This story (from the Wired blog) is making the rounds: terabytes of storage space on Google servers free to scientific projects that want to share data openly:
The storage would fill a major need for scientists who want to openly share their data, and would allow citizen scientists access to an unprecedented amount of data to explore. For example, two planned datasets are all 120 terabytes of Hubble Space Telescope data and the images from the Archimedes Palimpsest, the 10th century manuscript that inspired the Google dataset storage project.
This seems like a promising option for some (although probably not all) paleoanthropology datasets. Because it helps to address two of the biggest issues. One (at the top of everyone's awareness) is data access. But even though that's troubling to many people, I would say a bigger threat is the long-term future of datasets as the original collectors retire, lose interest, die, become crotchety (not that I know any that are crotchety...). Google is free, and they keep backups!
