Key points: Digital preservation will never be a solved problem: it needs constant reinvention, and is going to become harder over time. Scholarship is changing and this is affecting what needs to be preserved and what preservation means to the future of knowledge discovery. The diversification of outputs means that knowledge exists in a network of contextual metadata, data, software, standards and publications—requiring multilateral management of this complex knowledge graph. Preservation demands new skills, technologies and resources from librarians, publishers, funders and institutions—and more joined‐up thinking about archiving.

The Oxford Common File Layout describes a shared approach to filesystem layouts for institutional and preservation repositories, providing recommendations for how digital repository systems should structure and store files on disk or in object stores. The authors represent institutions where digital preservation practices have been established and proven over time or where significant work has been done to flesh out digital preservation practices. A community of practitioners is surfacing and is assessing successful preservation approaches designed to address a spectrum of use cases. With this context as a background, the Oxford Common File Layout (OCFL) will be described as the culmination of over two decades of experience with existing standards and practices.

Initially funded as part of the Jisc Data Spring Initiative, a team of stakeholders (publishers, data repository managers, coders) has developed a simple workflow to streamline data paper submission. Metadata about a dataset in a data repository is combined with ORCID metadata about the author to automate and thus greatly reduce the friction of the submission process. Funders are becoming more interested in good data management practice, and institutions are developing repositories to hold the data outputs of their researchers, reducing the individual burden of data archiving. However, to date only a subset of the data produced is associated with publications and thus reliably archived, shared and re-used. This represents a loss of knowledge, leading to the repetition of research (especially in the case of negative observations) and wastes resources. It is laborious for time-poor researchers to fully describe their data via an associated article to maximise its utility to others, and there is little incentive for them to do so. Filling out diverse submission forms, for the repository and journal(s), makes things even lengthier. The app makes the process of associating and publishing data with a detailed description easier, with corresponding citation potential and credit benefits.

The move to digital is being accompanied by a huge rise in volumes of (born-digital) content and data. As a result the curation lifecycle has to be redrawn. Processes such as selection and evaluation for preservation have to be driven by automation. Manual processes will not scale, and the traditional signifiers and selection criteria in older formats, such as print publication, are changing. The paper will examine at a conceptual and practical level how preservation intelligence can be built into software-based digital preservation tools and services on the Web and across the network ‘cloud’ to create ‘smart’ storage for long-term, continuous data monitoring and management. Some early examples will be presented, focussing on storage management and format risk assessment.

International non-governmental organisations (INGOs) that partner with national healthcare systems are well-positioned to contribute rich learning around implementation, and often influence health policy, guidelines and practice development. 1 2 Learning presents an area of cross-over between programmes and academia, with findings useful to both parties, who may also directly collaborate on some projects. However, though guidance for designing and conducting evaluations is well-developed and useful learning can be achieved,3–5 multiple challenges are often faced. More effective learning could reduce waste and unnecessary duplication within and between projects, bringing additional benefits and fewer unintended harms to communities.6