 Core data resources are of fundamental importance to the broad life science community and the long-term preservation of biological data. Imagine a centralized encyclopedia of the function of hundreds of thousands of proteins made accessible to life scientists throughout the world. With 900,000 user requests per month, the UniProt SwissProt Knowledgebase is the most widely used protein information database in the world. The situation is actually quite dramatic. A recent survey revealed that two-thirds of databases have only one year or less a short funding. Today's life science research cannot be conducted without data resources. The issue is that most open-access databases are currently financed by research grants and institutional funds. So if a database applies for a research grant, it will compete against research projects. Moreover, such grants are cyclic, so they are not stable in time. So in our study, we have analyzed 12 funding models for databases and we have applied them to the UniProt Knowledgebase. The objective was to find the ideal funding model by comparing pros and cons of each model in terms of, for example, open access, equity between users, the potential to generate sufficient income, or the stability of the income over time. We have selected what we have called the infrastructure model as a sustainable funding scheme that can be applied to other core data resources in the life sciences. Under the infrastructure model, funding agencies would set aside a fixed percentage of their research grant. The amount would be pooled and redistributed to core data resources according to well-defined selection criteria. Based on existing data, we have been able to estimate that less than 1% of the total amount dedicated to research grants in the life science would be sufficient to cover the cost of the core data resources worldwide. This model requires, of course, major changes on how funds are now distributed and necessitates collaboration at an international level. Caring for sustainability is really in our institutes DNA and raison d'être. SIB was founded following a funding crisis to ensure the long-term sustainability of the SwissProt database, which is now part of the UniProt consortium. So 20 years after SIB's foundation, the topic of the long-term sustainability of its knowledge basis is clearly still a hot topic. Joining forces globally is the key to long-term sustainability of knowledge preservation.