Data sharing and data archiving have a long tradition within the academic community. Repositories offer new tools for data sharing within a complex information environment. DSpace@Cambridge accepts data deposit thus offering stewardship of institutional knowledge assets of all types and facilitating compliance with the new research council policies and mandates.

You might be interested in some of the data sharing initiatives within the UK, for example:

• SPECTRa, a project completed in 2007 which provided Open Source tools to enable chemists to routinely deposit experimental data in Open Access digital repositories.
• DataShare Project, developing a niche model for deposit of ‘orphaned datasets’ currently filled neither by centralised subject-domain data archives/centres/grids nor by e-print based institutional repositories (IRs).
• GRADE Scoping a Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction, a project working on the infrastructure (both cultural and technical) for the utilisation of geospatial resources within the learning, teaching and research environments of UK academia.
• eBANK UK completed in 2007 the project worked in the area of digital repositories of crystallographic data. In 2008, the focus of activity moved to the follow-on eCrystals project.
• StORe Source-to-Output Repositories, an initiative to aiming to enable the repositories of published reports and papers to interact directly with the repositories of source data from which, in general, they are derived.