towards Certification of solid Earth Data REpositories in France – CEDRE

Certification is an efficient process to promote good data management practices in a sustainable way in a FAIR approach, but certification is rarely prioritised over operational tasks. This project aims at overcoming this obstacle by a joint effort of 13 solid Earth data repositories, all international or with international ties, towards application to CoreTrustSeal certification (output of RDA WG). The project is a joint operation of EPOS-France and ForM@Ter, and coordinated by the ISGI, the only involved data repository certified nowadays as regular member of World Data System. The philosophy behind the project is to transform the preparation process of certification from an individual to a collective effort, through joint work in three dedicated workshops. In the first workshop, all relevant information on certification will be shared through the participation of external experts. The data repositories will work in small groups to identify strengths and weaknesses in each datacentre in terms of certification. The second workshop will be dedicated to cross reading and evaluation of first drafts from each data repository, identification of remaining common weak points and bottlenecks. The third workshop will aim at finalising the certification applications. The time between each workshop will, from the project management side, be used for addressing common questions that arise during the previous workshop and all the way; from the data repository side, for improving on identified weak points that might hinder certification. Each data repository commits resources for the certification application and to implement the required upgrades, assuming that no major architectural problems arise. The objectives of the project are: a minimum of 2/3 of the data directories involved finalizing their application for certification and 100% of the data directories involved significantly improving their data management practices.