Making Research Data Repositories Visible: The re3data.org Registry

TLDR

Researchers need infrastructures that guarantee accessibility, stability, and reliability for sharing research data, a need increasingly framed as Research Data Repositories (RDR). The article aims to describe the heterogeneous RDR landscape, present a typology of repositories, and outline how re3data.org helps researchers identify suitable repositories. re3data.org indexes repositories, offers an overview of the landscape, and uses information icons to help researchers locate suitable repositories. By July 2013, re3data.org listed 400 repositories, 288 of which were detailed, demonstrating its utility in helping researchers locate suitable repositories.

Abstract

Researchers require infrastructures that ensure a maximum of accessibility, stability and reliability to facilitate working with and sharing of research data. Such infrastructures are being increasingly summarized under the term Research Data Repositories (RDR). The project re3data.org–Registry of Research Data Repositories–has begun to index research data repositories in 2012 and offers researchers, funding organizations, libraries and publishers an overview of the heterogeneous research data repository landscape. In July 2013 re3data.org lists 400 research data repositories and counting. 288 of these are described in detail using the re3data.org vocabulary. Information icons help researchers to easily identify an adequate repository for the storage and reuse of their data. This article describes the heterogeneous RDR landscape and presents a typology of institutional, disciplinary, multidisciplinary and project-specific RDR. Further the article outlines the features of re3data.org, and shows how this registry helps to identify appropriate repositories for storage and search of research data.