Trusted Digital Repository: Certification Tiers

Trusted digital repository

A digital repository whose mission, governance, technical infrastructure, and procedures have been independently assessed against a recognised standard (e.g. CoreTrustSeal, nestor seal, ISO 16363) and judged trustworthy to preserve digital content over the long term.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

Ask about Trusted digital repository

Answers are drawn from this dictionary entry and the rest of the CASRAI corpus, with a link to every source.

Answers are AI-generated from CASRAI’s own published pages and can be wrong, so check the linked sources before relying on one; your question is logged without personal data — never sold, never used to train a third-party model — to show us what CASRAI is missing, so please do not type personal or confidential details. How we use this

The ‘trusted’ in trusted digital repository is a third-party-assessed status, not a self-claim. Standards differ in depth and scope: CoreTrustSeal (16 requirements, lightweight self-assessment + peer review) is the most widely adopted baseline; nestor seal (DIN 31644) is the German standard; ISO 16363 (audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories) is the most rigorous. Funders and policy bodies increasingly require deposit into a trusted repository as a condition of funding.

References

Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems, 'Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS)', ISO 14721:2012.
ISO 16363:2012, Space data and information transfer systems — Audit and certification of trustworthy digital repositories.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Trusted digital repository"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/trusted-digital-repository" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/trusted-digital-repository",
  "name": "Trusted digital repository",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/trusted-digital-repository",
  "description": "A digital repository whose mission, governance, technical infrastructure, and procedures have been independently assessed against a recognised standard (e.g. CoreTrustSeal, nestor seal, ISO 16363) and judged trustworthy to preserve digital content over the long term.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/data-infrastructure#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/trusted-digital-repository",
  "sameAs": [
    "TDR",
    "Certified repository"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:10:36",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Trusted digital repository

Ask about Trusted digital repository

Worked examples

Looks similar, but isn't

References

Use in your systems