Towards a European Network of FAIR-enabling TDRs

'Towards a European network of FAIR-enabling Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)' is the initiative of a broad author team consisting of stakeholders from the European repository community, including DRI's Dr Natalie Harrower. It details a vision of how the Network could be created and what next steps need to be taken to make this a reality. The paper was created in continuation of the workshop that was held in January 2022, in which a large part of the community indicated a desire for this Network.

The core of the paper describes the main functions the Network should have in order to address the main challenges in the community: networking and knowledge exchange; stakeholder advocacy and engagement; and coordination and development. The functions and accompanying activities are described and depicted to show the potential of the Network. Next, the paper describes the steps that need to be taken to further detail and develop the Network, including membership, business model, and governance. 

The paper was created with input from the European repository community, as a consultation questionnaire was extended to the community in June 2022. The published paper will serve as input for the EOSC Task Force on Long Term Digital Preservation. One of the core activities mentioned in the charter of this Task Force is to produce recommendations on the creation of such a network.

'Towards a European network of FAIR-enabling Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs)' links into the work of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), which DRI is supporting via the EOSC Future project, an EU-funded H2020 project which aims to bring together research communities and infrastructure providers to give European researchers access to a wide web of FAIR data and related services. DRI has also supported the internationalisation and implementation of EOSC through previous projects with the Research Data Alliance (RDA) such as RDA4EOSC and through our work with the National Open Research Forum (NORF).

We invite you to read the paper on Zenodo