Ensuring Integrity In Self-Curated Collections: 12 Years of Reshare At The Uk Data Service

In 2026 the UK Data Service’s ReShare repository celebrates twelve years of helping researchers publish and preserve self-curated collections. Datasets, metadata, and documentation are often prepared largely by depositors, often under tight timelines and with diverse disciplinary norms. While self-curation expands capacity and empowers communities, it does not remove the need for robust in-house assurance. As data professionals at the nexus of policy, technology, and research practice, we face a practical challenge: how do we safeguard integrity when curation is shared?

This presentation reflects on how ReShare has grown since 2014 and what we have learned about maintaining trust at scale. We describe a hybrid integrity model: depositor-led preparation combined with structured, repository-led review and targeted interventions. Alongside standard technical controls (virus scanning, fixity, file and format review, and versioning), we outline our in-house integrity workflow for governance and risk: consent and confidentiality considerations, disclosure risk, intellectual property and licensing, access conditions, and documentation of decision-making.

We also highlight “basic but high-impact” metadata curation undertaken by repository staff to strengthen findability and reuse: normalising key fields, improving titles and descriptions, adding keywords and topic classifications, linking related outputs, and ensuring minimum documentation standards that align with FAIR principles. Using short case examples, we show common integrity pain points, unclear provenance, ambiguous licences, missing contextual files, and undocumented transformations, and how the repository review reduces downstream support burden while improving user confidence.