The paper highlights the importance of data sustainability in the data infrastructures aimed at long-term knowledge discoveries. Data sustainability refers to data’s capacity to endure across technological and human generations, and it problematizes the data governance literature from a temporal perspective. Existing work has already moved the literature from the organizational setting to more complex interorganizational settings, highlighting discrepancies between normative data governance models and organizational practices. We broaden this literature temporally by examining and outlining research directions for data sustainability from different meta-theoretical perspectives – evolutionary, relational, and durational.

Data sustainability across technological and human generations navigates complementary and competing temporal demands: Data need to transition across socio-technical regimes over time, yet be embedded in social and material networks to be meaningful; historical and present data also must remain available and accessible in near and distant futures, for going back in time and seeing new data linkages and combinations. We argue that data sustainability is critical in ensuring progression in social and environmental sustainability. The paper contributes both to data governance and sustainability literatures.