The role of generalist repositories in the research data landscape

The NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI), gave a presentation at SciDataCon in Salzburg in 2023 titled “Generalist repository ‘coopetition’ to enhance data sharing and discovery.” In that session, the seven generalist repositories participating in GREI (Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, Open Science Framework, Vivli, and Zenodo) presented our collaborative way of working together towards common standards for metadata and metrics, interoperability and discovery across repositories, and community outreach and training. We also solicited feedback on GREI’s efforts and priorities from the RDA and SciDataCon audience. 

In this BoF session, we built on a larger effort of the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy to understand the role of generalist repositories in the larger data ecosystem including with respect to discipline-specific repositories, institutional repositories, research community practices, emerging standards for research data and repositories, and infrastructure providers (e.g. PIDs, storage, search).  A 2020 Workshop hosted by NIH ODSS titled “The Role of Generalist Repositories to Enhance Data Discoverability and Reuse” laid the groundwork for the GREI program, and now in the 3rd year of GREI we endeavored to engage the RDA community in the discussion as well. The GREI project impacts researchers globally, as all participating repositories are freely available for data deposition by all researchers.

At this initial BoF session we sought to hear perspectives from the RDA community about the role of generalist repositories in the global data landscape, including how generalist repositories may adopt and help set global standards for data sharing and reuse. We hoped to identify use cases, repository functionality, or data or repository standards that generalist repositories could be leaders in, to support progress in the research data ecosystem. In turn, we evaluated the feedback received during this session to prioritize future GREI work and determine whether an RDA IG or WG on the topic would be worthwhile in order to enable the repositories to collaborate and align longer term, while avoiding duplication of efforts.