Crosswalks among stewardship maturity assessment approaches promoting trustworthy FAIR data and repositories

Abstract

Various maturity assessment approaches have been developed to help research data repositories effectively manage their holdings at both the organizational and dataset levels. Repositories can use these approaches as self-assessment tools—potentially leading to formal certification—to benchmark the maturity of their data holdings, highlight gaps in their practices, and improve their sustainability. Understanding the differences among these assessment approaches can provide beneficial information on stewardship best practices for supporting FAIR data managed by Trustworthy Data Repositories. However, it is a daunting task due to diversity in the perspectives of the approaches and the potential for subjective interpretation of individual criteria. In this article, we outline the commonalities and distinctions of three established assessment approaches: i) CoreTrustSeal Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements, ii) Data Stewardship Maturity Matrix, and iii) FAIR Guiding Principles. Strong correlations are found in data discovery, accessibility, interoperability, and usability due to overlapping requirements in digital object management. The study also reveals that the complexity of the approaches can lead to a large variety of inferred crosswalks among them.