A panorama of self-deposit practices in European and North American archives

This research paper analyses self-deposit operations in European and North American archives. By examining the obstacles to the introduction of self-deposit services stricto sensu (with minimum involvement of the data stewards), which are still rare, we will look closely at how data stewards support the curation and documentation effort that must be handled, at least partially, by the depositors themselves. Our analysis shows that self-deposit practices are a trend that is particularly marked in emerging archives. Very few studies tackled this subject head-on: how are curation practices actually carried out? What are the various costs involved? What types of guidelines are provided to depositors? How are the archive's recommendations and instructions accepted and followed by depositors? To what extent is the data re-use potential taken into account when it comes to self-deposit? While some of these questions have been addressed in the literature, albeit in very general terms, there is very little concrete feedback out there. This is the subject our paper tackles. Empirically, our research is based on 20 interviews (an in-depth questionnaire and/or guided interviews conducted remotely) conducted, between 2021 and 2022, with CESSDA archives or repositories referenced by the Dataverse network. In this paper, we will discuss several pitfalls in the implementation of open science policies: the difficulties in finding the right balance between the archive's workflows and the flexibility granted to depositors; the gap between the limited resources that data curation teams have and the extent of the tasks that ultimately fall on them to make data FAIR; the uncertainties over the modes of reasoned division of labour that can be put in place between depositors, data stewards and other data professionals, to optimise the self deposit workflow and the articulation deficit between self-deposit practices and the data re-use potential.