  There is growing interest in the issues of preservation and re-use of the
records of science, in the "digital era". The aim of the PARSE.Insight project,
partly financed by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Program,
is twofold: to provide an assessment of the current activities, trends and
risks in the field of digital preservation of scientific results, from primary
data to published articles; to inform the design of the preservation layer of
an emerging e-Infrastructure for e-Science. CERN, as a partner of the
PARSE.Insight consortium, is performing an in-depth case study on data
preservation, re-use and (open) access within the High-Energy Physics (HEP)
community. The first results of this large-scale survey of the attitudes and
concerns of HEP scientists are presented. The survey reveals the widespread
opinion that data preservation is "very important" to "crucial". At the same
time, it also highlights the chronic lack of resources and infrastructure to
tackle this issue, as well as deeply-rooted concerns on the access to, and the
understanding of, preserved data in future analyses.
