Since its launch in 2012, re3data has become the resource of information about research data repositories. It indexes and provides extensive information about more than 2450 research data repositories. Universities and research centres register their institutional, disciplinary and interdisciplinary research data repositories in re3data to enable researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions to select appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data. As a service of DataCite, hosted and run by the KIT Library, re3data enhances accessibility and visibility of research data repositories from all over the world.
Starting in January 2020, the German Research Foundation (DFG) is funding re3data’s project “re3data – Community Driven Open Reference for Research Data Repositories (COREF)” for 36 months. re3data COREF is a joint project of DataCite, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the Berlin School of Library and Information Science at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Helmholtz Open Science Office at the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).
The goal of the project is to connect re3data as the reference for research data repositories with other services and infrastructures. Therefore, re3data is going to provide customizable and extendable core repository descriptions that are persistently identifiable and can be referred and cited in an appropriate manner. This includes unique identification in machine-to-machine communication. The technical platform shall be advanced to facilitate the reuse of reliable and trustworthy information on research data repositories. External parties and their integration of repository descriptions from re3data will play a major role in the project. re3data will further develop its framework as a service for third parties to build applications and foster the usage of re3data as a community-driven source and reference for trustworthy repositories among the scientific community. This includes an elaborated API as well as easy embeddable widgets and tools.
Given the diverse and developing landscape of research data infrastructures, the metadata schema will be extended to enable customization by different domains and institutions. In addition, re3data shall be connected to and populated with metadata fragments, controlled vocabularies and database entries of external sources and repositories. Thus, re3data will refine its metadata schema, thereby reflecting the current development of research data repositories, including information on quality, trust and compliance with the FAIR-principles.
In order to achieve these objectives, re3data’s international editorial board as well as many external partners will contribute to the project. To integrate the service within the research data landscape, upcoming recommendations from RDA, EOSC, and NFDI will be adopted by re3data. Consequently, the project will lead to improvements of the overall data quality and provide new services tailored precisely to user and community needs.
Helena Cousijn
