Enhancing digital preservation strategies with European research community: Arkivum selected to be part of EOSC EDEN project

Arkivum is delighted to announce that we have been selected to take part in the EOSC EDEN project. The project, which started on the 1^st January 2025, seeks to advance digital curation and preservation across the European scientific research community. EDEN is one of two new projects that are collaborating on digital preservation and trusted digital repositories for EOSC (the other being FIDELIS).

What is EDEN?

The EDEN project aims to support and enhance the European research community’s digital preservation strategies by creating a framework to effectively assess what data should be preserved, how to re-appraise that data over time, and how to ensure that repositories used for that data provide the requisite digital preservation capabilities.  This assessment, appraisal and set of services will consider the use, quality and benefits of preserving a broad range of datasets and types.

EOSC EDEN will collaborate with the FIDELIS project to consolidate an expert curation network and boost effective data preservation and curation in Europe. The EDEN project consortium is made up from 16 organisation including representatives from a broad range of scientific disciplines, including Earth & Environmental Sciences, High-Energy Physics, Linguistics, and Social Sciences and Life Sciences and Bioinformatics. These organisations will test and validate various approaches and strategies throughout the project.

EDEN will also seek to raise awareness of not only digital preservation and explore other areas such as the impact of time on the application of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data management principles. The project will run for three years, until the end of 2027.

“EDEN is a great opportunity to work with leading institutions across Europe to better understand and advance how scientific research data can be made accessible and usable over the long-term for decades to come under the FAIR principles.  We are excited to collaborate on how digital preservation services and techniques can be applied to this problem, both within repositories and from service providers”, said the Arkivum lead for the project, Matthew Addis (co-founder and CTO)

In addition, Anu Märkälä, EOSC EDEN Project Coordinator from CSC on the project commented:

Different communities and scientific disciplines tend to have their own data quality standards, curation procedures and digital preservation methodologies. Our mission is to understand the current landscape, identify common standards and practices, and provide solutions and new approaches that help institutions in selecting and preserving high-quality FAIR research outputs. All this will also help to reduce the costs of preservation and increase the future re-usability of data.

Follow EOSC EDEN on social media:

• LinkedIN: Join EOSC EDEN public group 
• Bluesky: @eosc-eden.bsky.social

What is EOSC?

EOSC (or the European Open Science Cloud), is focused on providing European researchers, innovators, organisations and individuals with “a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes.” You can find out more about EOSC here.

This is the second EOSC project that Arkivum has been involved in. Between 2020 and 2022, Arkivum along with the Google Cloud Platform completed all three stages of the ARCHIVER project. This award-winning project sought to design, develop and test petabyte scale digital preservation solutions with scientific research organisations including CERN, EMBL-EBI and DESY.

The pioneering work undertaken during that project was recognised in 2022 by receiving the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) award for Collaboration and Co-operation (sponsored by the International Council on Archives (ICA)).

About Arkivum

Arkivum is a leading digital archiving and preservation solution provider. Supporting a diverse and global customer base, the Arkivum solution guarantees that customer data is secure, findable, accessible and usable for as long as it is needed.

Built upon the foundations of good practice for Long Term Digital Preservation and FAIR, the Arkivum solution combines innovative technology with digital preservation expertise and services.

By providing certainty and confidence in data retention, energy can be redirected where it’s needed most: innovating in the present.

Future-proof the past. Focus on the present.