In the interest of developing shared standards to help promote data sharing and open research, Springer Nature is pleased to be working with other publishers brought together by FAIRsharing and DataCite, to develop a common framework for use by publishers to assess the suitability of a repository for archiving data associated with a published article.

Springer Nature currently provides a list of repositories which mirrors the recommended repository list created and maintained by the Nature Research data journal, Scientific Data. As data publishing becomes more common, it is highly likely that other Springer Nature journals may wish to work with repositories that would not be in scope for Scientific Data authors. Scientific Data’s journal policies on data are by necessity more stringent than many other journals, for example Scientific Data can only recommend repositories offering open data licenses.

The development of a common framework for assessing repositories is an important step for publishers and editors when considering how best to support their authors in sharing their research data during article publication.  The framework intends to

• reduce complexity for researchers when preparing their submissions to journals,
• increase efficiency for data repositories that currently have to work with all individual publishers
• simplify the process of recommending data repositories for publishers

We invite you to consider the draft article that describes the work, its motivation, relations to other initiatives, and provide the authors with feedback.