What is the economic cost structure of preservation across architectural tiers?
The architectural framework (Q-0002) classifies preservation into four tiers. Each tier has a distinct cost profile: who pays, what they pay for, what fixed and marginal costs look like, and how those costs scale with coverage and time.
This question asks what an institution actually spends — and what value it gets — for preservation at each tier, and whether the marginal cost of moving from one tier to a more resilient tier is a barrier or a rounding error against the liability the lower tier carries.
The 1:10:100 Cost Heuristic (M-0004) is the analytical frame: prevention at the source costs $1, detection and correction after bad data propagates costs $10, and handling once bad data drives decisions costs $100. The paper applies this to preservation: prevention is the Tier 3 deployment, detection-and-correction is forensic recovery after loss, handling is FCA exposure and compliance failure.
Subsidiary questions:
- What does Tier 1 hosted storage cost per dataset, and what fails it?
- What does Tier 2 coordinated preservation cost, and what conditions make it sustainable?
- What is the marginal cost of adding Tier 3 protocol participation to existing institutional infrastructure?
- What is the documented return on investment for research data infrastructure across studies?