Two worlds meet: customising a general purpose repository for the specific needs of Life Sciences to achieve FAIRness for research data

The existing digital ecosystem surrounding scholarly data publication is not yet addressing all requirements of life sciences. Although for certain types of digital objects there are already well established repositories, a considerable part of the research data from life science never become accessible to the open world due to a lack of appropriate tools for their continuous use and preservation. Here, we describe how we adapted an existing general purpose repository at the University of Vienna to the domain specific needs of life sciences. We complemented the existing functionality of the repository with extended metadata scheme and user interface to support the needs of and methodologies used in life science, without affecting the usability of the main repository. We thus evaded setting up a new system, which, in turn, allowed us to reduce required effort and minimise future maintenance costs. The larger vision is to create a repository that can be used across both the humanities and life sciences, which will not only be used as a system for digital preservation but equally well as a platform to facilitate research by aiming to meet the FAIR data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).