Editorial commentary
A domain repository accepts data from a defined discipline or data type and builds its deposit workflow around that field’s own metadata schema, controlled vocabularies, quality-control checks, and reuse conventions — GenBank and SRA for sequence data, the Protein Data Bank (PDB) for macromolecular structures, ICPSR for social-science survey microdata, or the UK Data Service for UK social and economic data. It is not simply a repository with a narrower subject label attached to an otherwise generic deposit form — the curation and metadata are field-specific, which is what makes reuse and cross-study comparison within that field possible in a way a generalist repository deposit is not.
‘Domain’ vs ‘discipline-specific’
The terms are used interchangeably in most of the literature. Some communities differentiate them informally — ‘domain’ for broad fields (e.g. life sciences) and ‘discipline-specific’ for narrower sub-fields (e.g. proteomics) — but funder policies and repository registries such as re3data and FAIRsharing typically treat them as one category, contrasted against ‘generalist repository’.
Examples across fields
The category spans most data-intensive disciplines: GenBank/EMBL-ENA/DDBJ for nucleotide sequences and SRA for sequencing reads; the Protein Data Bank (PDB) for macromolecular structures; PRIDE for proteomics; GEO and ArrayExpress for transcriptomics; NeuroMorpho.Org for neuron morphologies; PANGAEA for earth-science observation data; the CDS (Strasbourg) for stellar astronomy; and ICPSR or the UK Data Service for social-science survey microdata. Funders increasingly require deposit in a discipline-appropriate repository wherever one exists for the data type in question.
The choice: when a domain repository is expected
NIH’s repository-selection hierarchy makes the expectation explicit: use an NIH-designated repository for the data type where one exists; otherwise use another discipline-specific repository meeting NIH’s desirable characteristics; fall back to a generalist or institutional repository only if no discipline-specific option exists. Many journals apply the same logic as a condition of publication in narrower form — depositing a novel protein structure in PDB, or a nucleotide sequence in GenBank/ENA/DDBJ, is typically a submission requirement, not a recommendation, for journals in those fields. Where no domain repository exists for a given output type, a generalist repository is the accepted, funder-recognised fallback — not a lesser option chosen by default.
Finding the right domain repository
re3data and FAIRsharing are the standard registries for locating a discipline-appropriate repository before defaulting to a generalist one; both index repositories by subject, data type, and certification status.
References
- NIH, ‘Selecting a Data Repository’ guidance (sharing.nih.gov).
- Whyte A., Wilson A., ‘Where to keep research data: DCC checklist for evaluating data repositories’, Digital Curation Centre.
- See also: re3data, FAIRsharing, CoreTrustSeal, trusted digital repository.
Also known as
Discipline repository · Specialist repository
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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