It Takes A Federation: Building Frdr Through National Partnership and Collaboration

The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) is a bilingual, scalable, federated platform for sharing and preserving Canadian research data. Launched nationally in Feb-2021, it now supports hundreds of thousands of researchers in Canada and beyond by providing a trusted place to deposit and preserve data, helping them meet Tri-Agency data-sharing requirements and advance Canada’s open science priorities.

Originally developed in-house at the University of Saskatchewan, FRDR has grown through close collaboration among libraries, institutions, and federal organizations, and is now overseen by the Digital Research Alliance of Canada. The production service itself is distributed: FRDR is operated across two host sites at Simon Fraser University and the University of Waterloo, with an archival site at SciNet (University of Toronto). The same collaborative approach shaped its discovery layer. FRDR’s original text-based search, developed at USask, was integrated with Geodisy, a CANARIE-funded geospatial search tool from the University of British Columbia, through the FRDR Discovery Redesign Project launched in 2021. This work led to Lunaris in 2022, a separate national discovery platform that now brings together records from more than 160 repositories across Canada, making research data easier to find and reuse.

This collaborative model now also drives FRDR’s next major evolution: a multi-phase Sensitive Data Pilot Project to extend the service to sensitive and controlled-access datasets and address a critical gap in Canada’s research data infrastructure.

In parallel, the FRDR User Community Group is being launched as a dedicated forum where researchers, librarians, and data professionals can directly connect with the product team, share feedback, surface emerging needs, and help shape the ongoing development of FRDR and its services—strengthening a national, partnership-driven approach to designing, governing, and scaling the platform.