Five UK universities sign up to new data archiving deal

Five UK universities, Queens University Belfast, Gonville & Caius, UCL, and the universities of Leeds and York, have purchased the Arkivum data archiving service via the Janet Data Archive Framework Agreement.

The five universities are the first to purchase the Arkivum service via the framework agreement, which was announced in January and enables fast and cost-effective archiving for research and education. Under the terms, customers of Jisc’s network, Janet, benefit from pre-negotiated, preferential pricing and a fully managed, easy-to-use service, through a single supplier framework. It also allows all qualifying organisations to procure the archive service quickly without the administrative overhead and costs of an EU compliant competitive tender.

Rhys Davies, director of IT at the University of Leeds commented, 'The Arkivum service will allow us to provide a long term guaranteed data archiving service to researchers with virtually no up-front capital investment and no infrastructure to manage locally.'

Dan Perry, director for product and marketing at Jisc’s network Janet said: 'In a world with massively expanding data storage requirements it is great to see universities quickly realising the benefits of cost-effective, long-term data storage with Arkivum through the Janet framework.'