Session 8: 16:45 - 17:30

Raman Ganguly

The Importance of Open Source for Repositories

We choose repositories to preserving data for the long-term and develop concepts (like the FAIR data principles) to givern how this data should be preserved. In the case of an infrastructure like a repository, we only think about the features that this infrastructure should have. However, we do not think a lot about the substantiality of the repository itself. Since we do not know what the digital world will look like in 20 years, we need to choose wisely our infrastructure to move our data from one software system to another. Open Source can help us in this case because this kind of software gives us clear insight into how they manage data internally. Open source solutions tend to follow standards more likely than proprietary software, and no licence model will force us to change if technology is still up to date.