A repository whose scope is bounded to a particular research discipline or sub-discipline, with curation practices, metadata schemas, and community standards tailored to that domain's data types, terminologies, and norms.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
GenBank as the discipline-specific repository for nucleotide sequences.
Is an instance
PANGAEA as the discipline-specific repository for earth and environmental science data.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
Zenodo or Figshare are generalist repositories, not discipline-specific.
Not an instance
An institutional repository whose scope is institution-wide is not discipline-specific.

Editorial commentary

Discipline-specific (also ‘domain’ or ‘specialist’) repositories are the preferred deposit destinations in many fields because they apply domain-appropriate curation, standardisation, and discovery. Examples: GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ for nucleotide sequences; PDB for protein structures; PRIDE for proteomics; GEO/ArrayExpress for transcriptomics; NeuroMorpho.Org for neuron morphologies; PANGAEA for earth-science observation data; CDS for stellar astronomy. Funders increasingly require deposit in a discipline-appropriate repository where one exists.

References

Whyte A., Wilson A., 'Where to keep research data: DCC checklist for evaluating data repositories' (Digital Curation Centre).

Also known as

Domain repository · Specialist repository

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Discipline-specific repository"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/discipline-specific-repository" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/discipline-specific-repository",
  "name": "Discipline-specific repository",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/discipline-specific-repository",
  "description": "A repository whose scope is bounded to a particular research discipline or sub-discipline, with curation practices, metadata schemas, and community standards tailored to that domain's data types, terminologies, and norms.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/discipline-specific-repository",
  "sameAs": [
    "Domain repository",
    "Specialist repository"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:21",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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