The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access has released Sustaining the Digital Investment: Issues and Challenges of Economically Sustainable Digital Preservation. Interim Report of the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.
Here's an excerpt:
During 2008, as the Task Force heard testimony from a broad spectrum of institutions and enterprises with deep experience in digital access and preservation, two things became clear: First, the problem is urgent. Access to data tomorrow requires decisions concerning preservation today. Imagine future biological research without a long-term strategy to preserve the Protein Data Bank (PDB), a digital collection that drives new insights into human systems and drug therapies for disease, and represents an investment of 100 billion dollars in research funding over the last 37 years. Decisions about the future of the PDB and other digital reference collections—how they will be migrated to future information technologies without interruption, what kind of infrastructure will protect their digital content against damage and loss of data, and how such efforts will be supported—must be made now to drive future innovation.
Second, the difficulty in identifying appropriate economic models is not just a matter of finding funding or setting a price. In many institutions and enterprises, systemic challenges create barriers for sustainable digital access and preservation.
Also see the related document: A Selective Literature Review on Digital Preservation Sustainability.