Open Research Data Repository to Progress FAIRness in Spatial Sustainability Sciences: The Story of ioerDATA

Research data repository (RDR) software provides solutions to progress digital transformation in relation to behavioural shift in scientific culture by ensuring secure access, preservation, management, archiving and measuring the impact of research data. The orientation to RDR solutions is an almost mandatory requirement to comply with scientific best practices. This contribution aims to present the experience of the journey to decide on a particular software solution that fits the purpose in the context of spatial sustainability sciences at the Leibniz Institute for Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER). During the evaluation, several community-driven, open-source platforms including CKAN and Dataverse were assessed. The choice of an RDR solution can have a significant impact on the scientific workflow, standards compliance, data governance, and operational efficiency. Adoption of one solution can have impacts on future scientific culture, workflow, standard, management and efficiency depending on its specific features and services. Therefore, selecting the appropriate solution required an evaluation process that considered key factors, including stakeholders, the institutional strategic landscape, existing workflow and IT infrastructure, with a preference on software suitability. Our conclusions are based on expert consultations, community feedback and desk research for deciding an RDR solution and enhancing FAIRness for the spatial science community. Since April 2025, the institutional research data repository of IOER — ioerDATA (https://data.fdz.ioer.de) has been online by adopting the open-source Dataverse (Powered by the Dataverse Project) as its chosen RDR software solution. The repository is managed and curated by the institute's Research Data Centre ( https://ioer-fdz.de ).