As the UK’s largest linear infrastructure project, High Speed 2 (HS2) necessitated the UK’s most extensive archaeological programme. The project’s monumental scale and complexity posed risks to data consistency, preservation, and reuse. The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) was mandated to manage this challenge, overseeing over 34 terabytes of heterogeneous data. This volume exposed the limitations of existing frameworks while providing a unique opportunity for innovation in archiving infrastructure and rationale. This paper reflects on how the ADS was transformed by HS2, evolving its technical capacity alongside its understanding of the organisational and ethical dimensions of large-scale curation. These challenges were a proving ground for testing future-proofed data management approaches. The resulting tools, workflows, and perspectives have expanded the ADS’s capacity to ensure data integrity in perpetuity, providing a long-term infrastructural benefit to the wider archaeological sector.
The burgeoning landscape of research data needs increasingly sophisticated yet integrated approaches to data management. Data Management Plans (DMPs) have become a cornerstone of good practice, but their full potential for fostering FAIR principles remains constrained by fragmented systems and a lack of overarching orchestration. This paper introduces the FAIRly Jointed Open Research Data (FJORD) framework, a conceptual evolution of DMPs designed to seamlessly integrate and orchestrate various components of the research ecosystem at an institutional level. Current Research Information Systems can incorporate FJORD as an agent-based approach operating at a metadata level, enabling holistic management from the initial project proposal stages to the final dissemination of research results. By enhancing DMPs into supplementary management tools and leveraging a project preregistration platform, FJORD allows for the managing, monitoring and tracking of intellectual assets through navigable knowledge graphs, aiding researchers throughout the research life cycle across multiple university systems. The framework is designed to export these research activity results as machine-actionable DMPs compatible with Research Data Alliance requirements and existing DMP tools, such as DMPonline. By providing a unified layer for metadata management and system interoperability, FJORD significantly enhances the tracking and assessment of FAIRness, streamlines institutional administrative burdens, and ultimately accelerates the pace of scientific discovery, while maintaining sovereignty of managing and reusing research information. This paper details the core tenets of the FJORD framework, its architectural design, and its potential impact on institutional research data strategies and governance.
Researchers today have to follow complex and strict administrative requirements in data management, ethics, and other regulatory areas. Responsible research necessitates these processes; however, they are often disconnected and repetitive, increasing administrative burden. To mitigate these issues, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has developed the Research Administration Platform (RAP), a streamlined research administration environment for researchers that is unified yet unique by connecting forms, prefilling data, and providing guidance and support. The RAP was developed using a co-creative and interactive design process where institutional stakeholders, including faculty representatives, support staff, researchers, and IT, were involved. The early phase focused on gathering requirements, platform selection, and evaluation. This was followed by an agile approach to developing core functionalities, including task generation, data prefilling, and connected support workflows. The platform has now reached a functional stage and is undergoing structured testing before a soft launch with two schools in 2026. This paper presents the motivation, methodology, development process, and early implementation of the RAP. It reflects on lessons learned, the organizational challenges of harmonizing diverse faculty workflows, and the role of digital tools in reducing administrative burden. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a unified platform approach and outlines plans for full institutional rollout.
Independent third-party audits of large-scale biomedical reference infrastructures remain rare, despite their potential to strengthen data quality, reproducibility, and user trust. This paper presents the first such audit of the Human Reference Atlas (HRA), produced by the Human BioMolecular Atlas Program. The HRA is a multi-format resource that includes anatomical structures, cell types, and biomarkers (ASCT+B) tables, two-dimensional (2D) Functional Tissue Unit (FTU) illustrations, three-dimensional (3D) reference objects, and Organ Mapping Antibody Panels (OMAPs). Conducted iteratively between March 2024 and August 2025, the audit examined data quality, internal consistency, and alignment with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Using a mixed-methods approach that combined spreadsheet-based validation, metadata analysis, and qualitative visual review, 34 ASCT+B tables, 22 2D FTU illustrations, 30 3D reference objects, and 21 OMAP data sets were assessed. The HRA shows strong alignment with its published standards and SOPs, achieving an overall compliance rate of 94.7 per cent across all four digital object types. Structural discontinuities were limited to 3 of 34 ASCT+B tables (8.8 per cent), and all documented issues were addressed in HRA version 2.3. Beyond these findings, the study contributes a transferable four-component framework for third-party data audits: SOP-to-checklist operationalization, formula-based consistency checks, tiered compliance assessment, and iterative feedback loops. We argue that independent auditing should become standard practice in digital curation as a means of strengthening accountability for publicly funded scientific infrastructures.
Drawing on Artefactual’s conceptual model for digital preservation systems, this report focuses on the importance of Information Packages preserved by an Open Archival Information System. In software design, there are five core design principles for digital preservation systems that, taken together, represent the best chance to ensure data can persist over time and space. The most important principle is that the Archival Information Package must be the system’s primary concern as the source of truth.
