Advancing Trust and Transparency: Insights from DCN Member Repositories on Meeting Desirable Characteristics for Federally Funded Research - Data Curation Network

"We recently presented a poster titled ‘Desirable Characteristics and Trust in Repositories: a cross-institutional comparison’ at IDCC 2024 in Edinburgh, Scotland. The poster summarized the self-evaluation performed by DCN member institutions in response to the 2022 National Science and Technology Council report, “Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories for Federally Funded Research.” The characteristics included a range of features that were thematically grouped: organizational infrastructure, digital object management, and technology. These themes are central to ensuring that data resulting from federally funded research is broadly accessible, robustly curated, and preserved over the long term, and DCN curators met and discussed how well our member institutions were meeting these characteristics.

The 17 institutional, data, and generalist repositories that participated in the conversation generally agreed that they satisfy the desirable characteristics. Some characteristics were identified as having room for improvement, requiring researcher buy-in, or existing in a state of transition or ambiguity. Most DCN member repositories do not take human subjects data, so we did not address those additional considerations...."