Trusted repositories display specific characteristics of organizational, 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, long-term sustainability of service including funding etc.).

• Refubium makes use of technical measures such as digital signatures (e.g., the creation of MD5 hashes during data ingestion) and time stamps to ensure (data) integrity and authenticity as well as protection against (data) falsification.

• A continuously adapted online help is provided, as well as guidelines on publishing research data.

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.

• in general, published resources (data and metadata) are openly available in accordance with the open access paradigm. In the case of sensitive data, the data may only be made accessible following approval. In the case of large volumes of data, data might not be able to be downloaded via HTTP, but via a customized data transfer solution, depending on the use case (e.g., FTP).

• Once activated on Refubium, every new document is assigned a DOI. DOIs are registered with DataCite by the University Library A URN is issued for published records that have been delivered to the German National Library (this is not yet the case for research data).

• Records include descriptive and administrative metadata, as well as licensing information (e.g., Creative Commons licenses or Refubium terms of use).

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.

• A bitstream-based long-term preservation is ensured for a minimum of ten years.
  
  

• Metadata are checked by the editorial team before publication/during ingestion, and procedures are in place specifying a liaison with depositors where issues are detected. Depositors require a valid university account or a valid email address. A ticket is created during the submission process. This is used for all further communication between depositor and editorial team until the data are released.

• Freie Universität members are qualified to publish their digital reasearch data on the server. Data release is carried out by the editors, not by the depositors. DSpace rights management is used, which can be used to specifically block access to metadata or data.