CoreTrustSeal: A Global, Community-Driven Model for Trustworthy Digital Repositories
CoreTrustSeal
Current CoreTrustSeal Board members include: Alina Danciu, Andrea Lammert, Aude Chambodut, Debbie Roth, Guoqing Li, Jared Lyle, Maaike Verburg, Maja Dolinar, Marjan Hartsuiker, Olivier Rouchon, Peter McGarvey, Tuomas J. Alaterä, Lisa de Leeuw, Ollie Parkes, and Lindsay Callaghan
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CoreTrustSeal is an international, community-driven certification framework that advances trustworthy digital preservation through collaboration. It ensures that digital materials remain safe, reliable, and accessible over time by providing a shared, practical standard for repositories worldwide. Established in 2017 to address the need for a practical, community-driven certification approach, CoreTrustSeal has evolved into a globally adopted model, with significant growth in participation, refinement of its peer review process, and expanded impact in recent years. What distinguishes CoreTrustSeal is not only the framework itself, but the global collaboration that develops, maintains, and applies it.
At its core, CoreTrustSeal is built on a shared understanding of what constitutes a trustworthy digital repository. Its 16 core requirements, covering organizational governance, digital object management, and technical infrastructure, were developed and continuously refined through international collaboration. The 2026-2028 CoreTrustSeal requirements were updated in 2025 through extensive community collaboration. This collective authorship ensures that the framework reflects real-world practices across scientific, cultural, and geographic contexts, rather than a single institutional or national perspective. Today, more than 170 repositories in 37 countries across 6 continents are CoreTrustSeal certified. The certification process is supported by a global pool of over 100 volunteer peer reviewers, and governance is provided by a board with representation from Europe, Asia, North America, and Africa.
A defining feature of CoreTrustSeal is its peer review model, which operationalizes collaboration. Applications are evaluated by reviewers drawn from the global CoreTrustSeal community, creating a reciprocal system in which certified repositories contribute back as reviewers, reinforcing a shared responsibility for maintaining standards. This distributed model ensures rigor and fairness, and fosters knowledge exchange, mentorship, and capacity building across borders. Repositories benefit directly from constructive feedback, while reviewers gain insight into a wide range of preservation approaches, strengthening the field as a whole.
CoreTrustSeal demonstrates collaboration at scale through its adoption by major international research infrastructures, including World Data System, CLARIN, and CESSDA. These partnerships make CoreTrustSeal certification a shared membership requirement, aligning expectations across communities that might otherwise operate independently. This coordinated approach reduces fragmentation in standards, lowers barriers for repositories seeking to participate in global networks, and creates a common baseline of trust. It enables collaboration across institutional, disciplinary, and national boundaries that would otherwise be difficult to achieve.
CoreTrustSeal occupies a unique position. It serves as an accessible entry point into a tiered framework of repository certification, complementing more advanced standards such as DIN 31644 (nestor Seal for Trustworthy Digital Archives) and ISO 16363. In doing so, it lowers barriers to participation while maintaining alignment with internationally recognized best practices. This positioning has enabled widespread adoption across disciplines and regions, making CoreTrustSeal one of the most widely implemented certifications for trustworthy digital repositories globally.
CoreTrustSeal’s collaborative impact is especially evident in its ability to bridge differences in resources, expertise, and regional context. By providing a clear yet flexible framework, it enables both well-established and emerging repositories, including those in under-resourced environments, to engage in digital preservation on equal footing. The peer review process, supported by detailed guidance and community interaction, helps organizations build capacity incrementally. In this way, CoreTrustSeal functions not only as a certification, but as a mechanism that expands participation and builds capacity across a global community of practitioners.
Leadership and advancement in digital preservation are demonstrated through CoreTrustSeal’s community governance and continuous, collaborative evolution. The framework is maintained and updated through an open, international collaboration of experts, ensuring that it remains responsive to emerging challenges and evolving expectations. This collective stewardship model reinforces both the credibility and sustainability of the certification.
Importantly, CoreTrustSeal has driven measurable improvements in repository practice, particularly in policy development, documentation, and technical workflows. Organizations seeking certification often formalize policies, strengthen documentation, and enhance technical workflows as part of the application process. These changes have lasting benefits, improving not only preservation outcomes but also organizational clarity and user trust. In this way, CoreTrustSeal acts as both a benchmark and a catalyst for advancement. CoreTrustSeal certifications are publicly available through the CoreTrustSeal website, providing practical examples that can be used for training, benchmarking, and inspiration. It has become an important part of the global digital preservation infrastructure, supporting collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and national boundaries.
CoreTrustSeal is a strong candidate for the Award for Collaboration and Cooperation because it demonstrates the impact of sustained collaboration. It has established a shared language for trust, reduced barriers to participation, created a pathway for continuous improvement, and strengthened the global ecosystem of digital stewardship. By helping repositories demonstrate and enhance their ability to preserve materials over the long term, CoreTrustSeal helps ensure that digital assets remain a durable foundation for research, innovation, and societal benefit.