Our General Counsel has looked at the issue from the Patent perspective.
His conclusion is 20 years for primary data. This is the time that he
thinks would be necessary for retention of data needed to defend an
intellectual property suit and prior art issues. Since imaging data, like
ratio imaging, is the only primary data, our Counsel would require that we
save it for 20 years. Since we are a Shared Resource providing a service
to other labs, we feel that it is our responsibility to do whatever we can
to retain the data for at least 20 years. That means that not only must
the media be readable for that time, but that readers/drivers must exist
to permit us to access the data 20 years from now. Right now, I am in the
process of migrating 50GB of Optical Disk data to CD. To me, the cost of
replicating the experiment far exceeds the cost of any digital media, so
why would you ever consider deleting files from an archive intentionally?

The other issue that we are trying to address is ownership of data and
data integrity. We are in the process of changing our archive system so
that users do not have write permission for their original data. The data
belongs to the PI and the Center where I work takes science ethics very
seriously. The data ultimately belongs to the PI, not the user. To permit
the user to have write access to the files places in jeopardy the
financial investment and integrity of the PI and the Center. I would much
rather drop another $0.08/MB on archiving than have to explain how and why
my resource could have been used to generate fraud.

It is a sticky issue and one that I have spent considerable time the past
three years trying to solve.

________________________________________________________________________________


Paul Goodwin
Instrumentation Laboratory
FHCRC, Seattle, WA

On Tue, 29 Jul 1997, Phil Allen wrote:

> Hi All;
>
> Mark Cannell raises an interesting question.  When are images "Junk" and
> can be discarded?  We're actively doing ratio imaging and the question of
> when we can discard "Junk" data constantly comes up.  What do people on the
> list think?  TIA
>
> Phil Allen
>
> ________________
> Philip G. Allen; Ph.D.
> Instructor in Medicine
> Brigham and Women's Hospital
> Division of Experimental Medicine
> LMRC 301
> 221 Longwood Ave.
> Boston, MA 02115
>
> 617-278-0321 (lab)
>        -734-2248 (fax)
>