  Astronomy has long had a working network of archives supporting the curation
of publications and data. The discipline has already created many of the
features which perplex other areas of science: (1) data repositories:
(supra)national institutes, dedicated to large projects; a culture of
user-contributed data; practical experience of long-term data preservation; (2)
dataset identifiers: the community has already piloted experiments, knows what
can undermine these efforts, and is participating in the development of
next-generation standards; (3) citation of datasets in papers: the community
has an innovative and expanding infrastructure for the curation of data and
bibliographic resources, and through them a community of author s and editors
familiar with such electronic publication efforts; as well, it has experimented
with next-generation web standards (e.g. the Semantic Web); (4) publisher
buy-in: publishers in this area have been willing to innovate within the
constraints of their commercial imperatives. What can possibly be missing? Why
don't we have an integrated framework for the publication and preservation of
all data products already? Are there technical barriers? We don't believe so.
Are there cultural or commercial forces inhibiting this? We aren't aware of
any. This Birds of a Feather session (BoF) attempted to identify existing
barriers to the creation of such a framework, and attempted to identify the
parties or groups which can contribute to the creation of a VO-powered
data-publishing framework.
