What should be the essential baseline practices for repositories that manage research data?

COAR and SPARC have published a joint response to the OSTP Request for Public Comment on Draft Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting From Federally Funded Research.

Good data management is critical for ensuring validation, transparency of research findings, as well as to maximize impact and value of publicly-funded research through data reuse. Repositories provide crucial services that manage and provide access to data, articles, and a wide array of other types of scholarly content and are essential community tools for good data management.

Our response seeks to achieve a balance between the use of best practices for managing data in repositories while at the same time ensuring that requirements are not so overly onerous that they result in excluding a large number of repositories.

We propose a framework that provides essential practices for repositories, based on specific objectives. Our proposal is based on input from the repository community in the US and internationally, and with consideration of the current recommended characteristics outlined in a number of other contexts: Data Citation Roadmap for scholarly data repositories, Core Trust Seal, FAIR data principles,  PLOS “Criteria that Matter”, TRUST, and COAR Next Generation Repositories Technologies.

Currently there are initiatives and assessment models for repositories that focus on different objectives (for example, FAIR criteria are focused on discovery and reuse, while the Core Trust Seal is focused on sustainability and preservation). COAR would like to bring these various criteria together into a comprehensive framework for best practices in repositories, that would also provide a tiered approach which include “essential”, “highly recommended”, and “nice to have” criteria.

Over the next several months, an international working group at COAR will refine, expand and validate the initial framework below, bringing together community-accepted norms and practices across all key areas. Widespread community input will be a critical aspect of this process.