Research data repositories: re3data.org

The research data is very valuable, and its permanent access is one of the greatest challenges for all agents involved in the scientific world: research staff, funding agencies, publishers and academic institutions. The long-term conservation of data and the culture of open access are sources of new opportunities for the scientific community. More and more universities and research centers offer repositories with their research data, allowing permanent access to them. Thus, due to the requirements of each academic discipline, the existing repositories are very varied.

The research staff faces every day this universe of multiple repositories, tools, formats ... in which consulting the desired data without a guide requires many resources of time and effort. Re3data.orgis an international registry of research data repositories (Registry of Research Data Repositories) where metadata is collected from repositories specialized in storing research data. Thanks to this compilation work, the research staff, funding organizations, libraries and editors can search and visualize the main repositories of research data, being able to search and faceted views by discipline, subject, country, contents, formats, licenses, language, etc.

The re3data.org registry was born as a joint project of several German organizations, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The official launch took place in May 2013 and the DataBib catalog was subsequently integrated to avoid duplication and confusion due to the existence of two similar parallel registers. The unification project was sponsored by DataCite, an international non-profit organization whose goal is to improve the quality of data citations. In addition, re3data.org collaborates with other Open Science projects such as BioSharing or OpenAIRE.

Multiple publishers, research institutions and funding organizations refer to the re3data.org registry in their editorial policies or guidelines, as the ideal tool for the identification of data repositories. One of the most notable examples is the European Commission (together with Nature and Springer), since it mentions it in the document "Guidelines for Guidelines to the Rules on Open Access to Scientific Publications and Open Access to Research Data in Horizon 2020

Currently, the metadata of the repositories stored are those listed in version 3 of the Metadata Schema for the Description of Research Data Repositories.

The registry identifies and lists nearly 2,000 repositories of research data, which makes re3data.org the largest and most complete repository of data repositories available on the web. Its growth has been constant since its launch, covering a wide range of disciplines.

As regards Spain, and as of December 1, 2017, 23 repositories of research data are cataloged in which Spain participates.

The promotion of open science, the culture of exchange, the reuse of information and open access is found in the foundations of the re3data.org project. And on these solid foundations the tool continues increasing the collected metadata, and therefore the visibility of the research data. Continuing to work on increasing this visibility and enhancing open science is not only essential to guarantee research work based on previous milestones, but it also allows us to exponentially expand the horizons of scientific work.