NASEM 2020 — current research-funding regime is structurally misaligned with multi-decade preservation

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine's 2020 report Life-Cycle Decisions for Biomedical Data: The Challenge of Forecasting Costs examines economic factors for data acquisition, curation, preservation, accessioning, and deaccessioning. The report finds that "the current system for funding research is not conducive to data life-cycle cost forecasting" — the funding mechanism (3-5 year project-scoped grants) is structurally misaligned with the preservation horizon (decades).

The finding directly supports R5 (C-0044, fund preservation through facilities and administrative cost recovery): if grants run 3-5 years and preservation needs run decades, scoping preservation to grants forces researchers to deprecate preservation obligations at grant close — the operational origin of the personnel-departure failure mode in C-0017 / E-0011-13. NASEM's recommendation is that preservation be treated as a continuing facilities cost rather than a project-scoped expense, which is the substance of R5. The same misalignment underlies C-0036 (preservation horizon decouples from project budget): under Tier 3, preservation becomes a byproduct of participation rather than a line item on a time-bounded award.