Abstract
Researchers are increasingly required to make research data publicly available in data repositories. Although several organisations propose criteria to recommend and evaluate the quality of data repositories, there is no consensus of what constitutes a good data repository. In this paper, we investigate, first, which data repositories are recommended by various stakeholders (publishers, funders, and community organizations) and second, which repositories are certified by a number of organisations. We then compare these two lists of repositories, and the criteria for recommendation and certification. We find that criteria used by organisations recommending and certifying repositories are similar, although the certification criteria are generally more detailed. We distil the lists of criteria into seven main categories: “Mission”, “Community/Recognition”, “Legal and Contractual Compliance”, “Access/Accessibility”, “Technical Structure/Interface”, “Retrievability” and “Preservation”. Although the criteria are similar, the lists of repositories that are recommended by the various agencies are very different. Out of all of the recommended repositories, less than 6% obtained certification. As certification is becoming more important, steps should be taken to decrease this gap between recommended and certified repositories, and ensure that certification standards become applicable, and applied, to the repositories which researchers are currently using.
Highlights
Data sharing and data management are topics that are becoming increasingly important
When we look at recommended repositories with certification, only 13 out of 242 recommended repositories had any kind of certification: six repositories were certified by the Data Seal of Approval (DSA); six by the ICSU-WDS; none by NESTOR, Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification (TRAC), or Trusted Data Repository (TDR) (Figure 3)
The umbrella categories which we identified for data repositories indicate that publishers, community organisations and certification schemes largely agree on quality
Summary
Data sharing and data management are topics that are becoming increasingly important. To be able to share data, both and in the future, datasets need to be preserved, and need to be comprehensible, and useable for others. To ensure these qualities, research data needs to be managed (Dobratz et al 2010) and data repositories can play a role in maintaining the data in a useable structure (Assante et al 2016). As many repositories have not yet adopted generally accepted standards, it can be difficult for researchers to choose the right repository for their dataset (Dobratz et al 2010)
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