R5 — Fund preservation through facilities and administrative cost recovery

Audience: Funders and research institutions (jointly, through F&A rate negotiation).

Action: Include preservation infrastructure as a recognized category in facilities and administrative cost rate calculations, and negotiate rates that reflect the long-term institutional cost of data stewardship. Treat preservation as a continuing facilities cost rather than a project-scoped expense.

Rationale: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine documented in 2020 that "the current system for funding research is not conducive to data life-cycle cost forecasting" (S-0116). Grants run three to five years; preservation needs run decades. A funding mechanism that scopes preservation to grants forces researchers to deprecate preservation obligations at grant close — the operational origin of the §3.1 (C-0017) and §3.3 (C-0019) failure modes.

Facilities and administrative cost mechanisms already exist for exactly this purpose. R5 is to apply them. The architectural counterpart is C-0036 (preservation horizon decoupled from project budget); R5 is the funding-mechanism counterpart that makes the architectural decoupling sustainable.

R5 is the recommendation with the longest implementation timeline because it requires negotiation between funder and institution at the F&A rate level. It is also the recommendation with the largest sustainable financial impact because it shifts preservation cost from project line items (where it competes with research activities for limited grant dollars) to institutional infrastructure (where it is amortized across all federally funded research).