On October 29, 2025, the FIDELIS project reached an important milestone: the completion of its first comprehensive landscape analysis of European digital repositories. This work, delivered as Milestone 13, provides a foundation for building a federated network of Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs) aligned with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
Why a Landscape Analysis?
Repositories are essential for preserving and sharing research data, but they vary widely in maturity, practices, and technical capabilities. To support harmonisation and interoperability, FIDELIS needed a clear picture of the current state of repositories across Europe – their strengths, gaps, and expectations.
How We Did It
Task 5.2 combined two complementary approaches:
- Community Survey: Gathering insights from 144 repositories in 27 countries on practices, challenges, needs, and expectations with respect the upcoming FIDELIS Network
- Desk-Based Mapping: Reviewing standards, policies, and best practices across five scientific domains, guided by the Transparent Trustworthy Repository Attributes Matrix (TTRAM).
What We Learned
The analysis revealed:
- Strong adoption of metadata standards and persistent identifiers, but uneven semantic integration.
- Widespread organisational challenges, including funding instability and fragmented governance.
- High demand for training, certification support, and legal harmonisation.
- High level of interest for collaboration through the future FIDELIS Network.
What’s Next
These findings will inform the next phase of FIDELIS: developing harmonisation strategies, federation models, and practical support tools in WP6 and WP7. Together, we aim to build a resilient, interoperable, and trustworthy repository ecosystem for Europe.
Explore the full milestone outputs on Zenodo:
Supporting documents:
Digital repository capabilities and characteristics mapping report. Zenodo.
Digital repository capabilities and characteristics mapping spreadsheet [Data set]. Zenodo.