Commercial services for Digital Preservation that are currently available have not been proven to scale to the "petabyte region and beyond", not address the complex data types, often domain-specific, that are needed by many scientific disciplines. In-house services – where they exist – have often not acquired the degree of “trustworthiness” verified through certification schemes.

Using a Pre Commercial Procurement instrument, the ARCHIVER project will introduce radical improvements in the area of archiving and digital preservation services, thus closing critical gaps between what is increasingly required by funding agencies, requested by data creators and eventual (re-)users and what is currently commercially available. ARCHIVER will combine multiple ICT technologies, including extreme data-scaling, network connectivity, service inter-operability and business models, in a hybrid cloud environment to deliver end-to-end archival and preservation services that cover the full research lifecycle. By acting as a collective of procurers, the consortium will create an eco-system for specialist ICT companies active in archiving, who would like to introduce new services capable of supporting the expanding needs of research communities but are currently prevented from doing so because there is no common procurement activity for the advanced stewardship of publicly funded data in Europe. ARCHIVER’s final goal is to allow research group to retain ownership of their data whilst leveraging best practices, standards and economies of scale.
ARCHIVER - Archiving and Preservation for Research Environments - receives funding from the European Union's Horizion 2020 research and innovation programme.