Trustworthy Digital Repository

Mission

Edinburgh DataShare’s mission is to anticipate and serve the data sharing, publication and preservation needs of researchers at the University of Edinburgh within an open access environment.

CoreTrustSeal 

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CoreTrustSeal is an international, non-profit organization promoting sustainable and trustworthy data infrastructures, under the umbrella of the global Research Data Alliance. It is the product of close collaboration between two predecessor certifying bodies - the World Data System of the International Science Council (WDS) and the Data Seal of Approval (DSA). 

Edinburgh DataShare had previously received the 3-year Data Seal of Approval certification in 2017. In January, 2022, Edinburgh DataShare received its succcessor certification, the CoreTrustSeal. CTS is a peer-reviewed certification that measures our documented application against its Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements. The team is likely to pursue new certification in 2027, barring any major software upgrades, migrations, or prohibitive staffing resource constraints. (In June, 2026 the repository platform was successfully updated from DSpace 6.5 to DSpace 8.3, a major release.)

Much of what the CoreTrustSeal ensures is that we are serious about our commitment to preserve our researcher’s data for the long-term. But it is also about ensuring that data are usable for the benefit of other researchers, known as the ‘designated community’.

Sustainability of repositories raises a number of challenging issues in different areas: organizational, technical, financial, legal, etc. Certification can be an important contribution to ensuring the reliability and durability of data repositories and hence the potential for sharing data over a long period of time. By becoming certified, repositories can demonstrate to both their users and their funders that an independent authority has evaluated them and endorsed their trustworthiness.

CoreTrustSeal

Standards of Trust

The CTS is one type of 'trust standard', most suitable for institutional research data repositories. Other examples are Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories (ISO 16363) and Criteria for Trustworthy Digital Archives (DIN 31644). Additionally, we measure ourselves against the COAR Community Framework for Good Practices in Repositories from the Confederation of Open Access Repositories, of which the University of Edinburgh Library is a member.

A set of principles, rather than certification, has also emerged from the repository community in 2020, called TRUST: defining best practice through transparency, responsibility, user focus, sustainability, and technology. The Research Data Support team aspire to meet these principles, as well as to assist depositors with another important set of principles, FAIR. Data depositors can “make their data FAIR” by documenting and formatting their research data so as to be findable (discoverable), accessible, interoperable, and reusable. 

An important aspect of FAIR is that to be discoverable, the data need not be completely open; restricting access in some cases is more responsible, such as for personally identifying data or sensitive data of any sort. This is why the support team can advise on the most appropriate way to archive and make data available, depending on circumstances. Another set of principles relevant to a subset of researchers is the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

Researchers, the repository and trust

Perhaps even more important than attaining an official standard is knowing that researchers trust Edinburgh DataShare. What makes university data creators more likely to share their data using the institutional data repository? What makes external users more likely to use datasets they find in DataShare?

We know that items in the repository score high in search results on Google and Google Scholar. We also emphasise the benefits for depositors down the line, for example when they move to another institution, to be able to easily obtain their data, knowing that its integrity is secured.

We hope that the careful guidance we give data creators about how to share and preserve their data, the quality checks we do upon submission, as well as the rule that every data item must include some human-readable documentation, reaffirms our commitment and reassures users that they are accessing and using quality data. We trust that the University of Edinburgh’s reputation for world-class research lets users know that they are getting authentic, state of the art research data outputs from the DataShare repository.

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