Trusted repositories are:
- Certified repositories (e.g. CoreTrustSeal, nestor Seal DIN31644, ISO16363) or disciplinary and domain repositories commonly used and endorsed by the research communities. Such repositories should be recognised internationally.
- General-purpose repositories or institutional repositories that present the essential characteristics of trusted repositories, i.e.:
- display specific characteristics of organisational, technical and procedural quality such as services, mechanisms and/or provisions that are intended to secure the integrity and authenticity of their contents, thus facilitating their use and re-use in the short- and long-term. Trusted repositories have specific provisions in place and offer explicit information online about their policies, which define their services (e.g. acquisition, access, security of content, longterm sustainability of service including funding etc.).
- provide broad, equitable and ideally open access to content free at the point of use, as appropriate, and respect applicable legal and ethical limitations. They assign persistent unique identifiers to contents (e.g. DOIs, handles, etc.), such that the contents (publications, data and other research outputs) are unequivocally referenced and thus citeable. They ensure that contents are accompanied by metadata sufficiently detailed and of sufficiently high quality to enable discovery, reuse and citation and contain information about provenance and licensing; metadata are machine- actionable and standardized (e.g. Dublin Core, Data Cite etc.) preferably using common non-proprietary formats and following the standards of the respective community the repository serves, where applicable.
- facilitate mid- and long-term preservation of the deposited material. They have mechanisms or provisions for expert curation and quality assurance for the accuracy and integrity of datasets and metadata, as well as procedures to liaise with depositors where issues are detected. They meet generally accepted international and national criteria for security to prevent unauthorized access and release of content and have different levels of security depending on the sensitivity of the data being deposited to maintain privacy and confidentiality.