AUSSDA was awarded the Core Trust Seal (CTS) for the first time in 2020. To ensure the quality of this label, certified archives must reapply every three years. All standards and processes are subjected to a detailed audit (see report). Once again, AUSSDA was able to fulfil the strict Core Trust Seal criteria and is therefore certified as a "Trustworthy Data Repository" until November 2026.

Archiving your research data at AUSSDA as a trusted repository is a major benefit in any funding application or DMP (data management plan). Thanks to the (renewed) CTS certification, AUSSDA fulfils the strict requirements of funding bodies regarding the archiving and sharing of research data.

Many innovations from recent years have been incorporated into the current certification. AUSSDA started as a project in 2017 and is now established as a consortium at several universities. Operation and funding are therefore secured for the long term. In addition, a new partner institution has joined the consortium: the University of Innsbruck and a new governance structure with the AUSSDA steering board and our new user advisory board has been established. This ensures we can continue to develop our services according to the needs of our users. Since the first CTS certification, we have developed a number of additional services, such as self-deposit of datasets for partner institutions, fast-track data archiving for urgent projects such as the COVID collection in our Dataverse as well as archiving qualitative data.

With this certification, AUSSDA, as Austria's CESSDA Service Provider, continues to fulfil the requirements of CESSDA ERIC for its members.

The CTS is also a formal confirmation that AUSSDA operates according to international standards and that our processes and services are internationally recognised as good practice. We are very happy to have our professional work acknowledged!