Within the federal government, the largest funder of scientific R&D in the United States, there are no common standards for retention of scientific information, nor is there a clear fiscal mechanism to address the costs inherent in long term data retention.

At the same time scientists continue to bring online powerful new instruments creating terabytes or more of data. As numerous X2 authors have noted in their signals, data archiving has not achieved prominence as a strategic element of scientific investigation.

While yesterday's technology allowed us to "stand on the shoulder's of giants" by examining their lab notebooks, today's scientists write in binary across large heterogeneous data sources. Scientific publications still help us crystallize and share results, but the underlying data (critical to verification and expansion of knowledge) is becoming a) almost too vast to comprehend, and b) locked away in individual data silos in proprietary application formats.

In the next give to ten years at least one major scientific effort will be forced to backtrack to recreate data that will be lost due to lack of archiving and long-term storage.