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The ESO Science Archive is a powerful scientific resource for the entire astronomical community, contributing up to 45% to the overall ESO scientific output, as quantified by refereed publications in international journals. It stores and preserves the raw data generated by all ESO facilities and instruments, and an always growing variety of processed products. It allows the browsing and retrieval of all these data from the La Silla-Paranal Observatory, as well as from ALMA. The processed products come primarily from ESO Public Surveys, Large Programmes, and from the bulk processing of selected instruments carried out by ESO as part of the quality control process. As both astronomical instrumentation and data grow in complexity and volume, managing and reducing raw telescope data becomes a challenge for non-experts. The driving principle of the ESO Phase 3 process, which provides the channel to publish reduced data, is to delegate data reduction to experts while providing the astronomical community at large with ready-to-use products and securing their long-term preservation in the ESO Science Archive. This collaborative effort between the archive and the scientific teams has been in operation since 2011 and delivers numerous benefits to the scientific community and data providers, including enhanced data visibility through Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), quality certification, long-term data preservation, improved metadata/data characterization and the possibility of providing services and capabilities on top of a homogeneous data archive. In this contribution we highlight the way in which a curated data archive increases the legacy value of the products. We are going to illustrate the Phase3 process and the ESO Science Data Product Standard, a data interface document to which the reduced products must adhere. This standard ensures a uniform data and metadata format. We also present the automated audit process to verify compliance with the standard and the role that the archive team plays in assisting data providers in preparing the products and organizing their submission. We wish to share our experience in involving the community, in providing user support, how the system has been improved and our lessons learned. We conclude by providing an outline of the foreseen future developments.
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