Metadata Recommendations for Repository Adoption from the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative | by The GREI Community | Sep, 2025 | Medium

"A major goal of the NIH GREI initiative is to “enhance data sharing and re-use.” Key to that goal is ensuring that shareable data sets are findable and that secondary researchers can easily determine which dataset(s) are suitable for or can support their research. Effective findability depends on rich metadata describing the datasets, which is much more valuable if repositories collect a common set of metadata fields using common vocabularies and standard values for that metadata.

To advance this goal, the repositories of the GREI Initiative — Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo, with invaluable input from DataCite — have collaborated on a set of metadata recommendations that strongly encourage repositories to collect specific metadata when researchers publish their research outputs. This set of recommendations has just been expanded and updated in the GREI Metadata Recommendations from DataCite schema version 4.6, which builds on the original GREI metadata recommendations published in 2022.

The repositories have based these recommendations on properties from the DataCite Metadata Schema (v4.6) in an effort to enhance compatibility between repository metadata and persistent identifier (PID) metadata. GREI repositories will adopt these recommendations to better align their metadata schemas, a key GREI objective that supports both data sharing and discovery across the generalist repositories. The GREI repositories also hope that these recommendations help other repositories, such as discipline-specific repositories and institutional repositories, align their metadata for cohesive data sharing and discovery across the data repository ecosystem."