Arkivum and the ARCHIVER project

Big Science tackles humanity’s toughest questions through massive, collaborative research projects, pushing the boundaries of technology to increase our understanding of the universe. Key to this research is generating, processing and preserving data on an unprecedented scale. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an EU funded initiative to provide European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with an open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes.

The ARCHIVER project, started in 2019, was a €4.8M European Commission-backed R&D project, focused on creating a petabyte-scale digital preservation solution to serve the scientific research community across Europe. CERN was a leading partner in the multinational scientific group, driven by its need to preserve the vast array of experimental data generated by the Large Hadron Collider in an accessible, sustainable way.

As lead partner in the ARCHIVER project, CERN were looking for a solution to the challenge of storing and preserving data on an unprecedented scale to ensure it remains open and available to the global research community for decades to come. CERN also needed to understand and limit the environmental cost of preserving and processing this quantity of data, while delivering on the FAIR data principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.

Arkivum were invited to participate in the project based on their track record of supporting organisations with long-term data retention and archiving requirements. The initial connection with CERN was made when Arkivum attended an event hosted by STFC back in 2018. Partnering with Google, Arkivum were selected to be part of the first stage of the EC co-funded project to design a new approach for petabyte-scale archiving and preservation of valuable research data, determining how best to ensure its long-term integrity and accessibility, and so further the cause of future scientific discovery.

Arkivum were subsequently selected to continue to the Prototyping and Piloting stages of the project, completed in 2022, spending over 3 years designing, prototyping and piloting innovative new services for the long-term digital preservation of scientific datasets.

João Fernandes led the project from the CERN side. He says, “Arkivum work was really good and appreciated by our technical teams, and I have put them in contact with other organisations that were interested in the resulting services of the ARCHIVER project.”

Tom Lynam is Arkivum’s Marketing Director. He says, “We wanted to be involved with this project as a world leading digital preservation initiative. We had a great relationship with CERN throughout the project, they were very open and easy to work with.

“We were invited to take part in several international conferences with CERN to showcase our work, and were delighted to be recognised alongside CERN when the ARCHIVER project was presented with the International Council on Archives (ICA) Award for Collaboration and Co-operation at the DPC 2022 Digital Preservation Awards in Glasgow in 2022.”

Arkivum benefitted significantly from the ARCHIVER project. Tom says, “Collaborating with CERN helped develop our product, improving our scalability, robustness and sustainability that our current customers now benefit from. Working with CERN for such a prestigious project has helped us when engaging with prospective new employees, new and existing investors and partners. It also meant we were well placed for future projects with CERN.”

The project has accelerated and de-risked Arkivum’s ability to enter a new market with an innovative product and service that addresses the problem of long-term digital preservation and access to scientific research datasets.

Matthew Addis, CTO of Arkivum, says, “Without this project, we would have been unlikely to target this market on our own due to the level of up-front investment needed, a lack of pre-existing contacts and partnerships, and the cost of diverting time, effort and money away from other aspects of our business.  The approach of sharing costs, risks and benefits has enabled us to rapidly innovate, test and validate new product and service offerings. We’ve made major improvements to our software solution for long term data preservation (LTDP), allowing organisations to provide long-term access to hugely valuable scientific data in a way that is cost-effective at scale, ensures environmental sustainability and applies good practice in digital preservation and archiving so that datasets remain Findable Accessible Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) for decade timescales or more.” Matthew goes on to say, “Having worked very successfully with CERN and the other ARCHIVER partners, the project has paved the way for our involvement in a new and even bigger EC project called EDEN which will fully embed long term digital preservation into EOSC”.