FAIRsharing Community, a group of representatives from publishers and scholarly communication organisations, have published a set of criteria for the identification and selection of data repository to guide authors in terms of where they should deposit their data. The aim of the document is to make the implementation of research data policies more efficient and consistent, to help improve approaches to data sharing through the promotion of data repositories who meet the criteria. While advice on adoption of best practices is a worthy and necessary effort, there have been some concerns expressed in the repository community about the requirements contained in the 'Data Repository Selection: Criteria that Matter'.
Different projects and initiatives, such as COAR, who brought together many of the requirements – assessed and validated them with a range of repository types and across regions – resulting in the publication of the COAR Community Framework for Best Practices in Repositories, have been looking at requirements for repositories before. However, there is a risk that if repository requirements are set very high or applied strictly, then only a few well-resourced repositories will be able to fully comply. To prevent this, COAR expressed their concern about the criteria set out in ‘Data Repository Selection: Criteria that Matter’.
OpenAIRE supports COAR's Response to ‘Data Repository Selection: Criteria that Matter’ sharing its concern for exclusion of repositories based on a set of criteria which will weaken the repository ecosystem because the criteria proposed are not yet supported by most data repositories, and they are also too narrowly defined missing some very important considerations.
In particular, OpenAIRE is concerned about the counterproductivity to set strict criteria, a hard line on data curation being done by the repository, introducing a new scale for the life cycle status of the repository, and the presence of data preservation policy to the level of a credible policy.
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