Communities
A community groups together records that share a common owner, topic, or governing body — for example a project team, a department, or a dataset series. When a record is created within a community, it belongs to the community rather than to the individual depositor, and the community’s rules govern its whole lifecycle.
For how a community’s deposition lifecycle is configured (roles, review steps, permissions), see the Workflows documentation. This page covers creating and managing the community itself.
Creating a community
Only a repository administrator can create a community and assign its owner. The community owner then manages membership, roles and the community’s curation policy.
Create the community
A repository administrator creates the community and assigns a community owner (curator).
Configure the workflow
Assign a default deposition workflow to the community. This determines how records are submitted, reviewed and published. See Apply workflow.
Add members and assign roles
The community owner adds users to the community and assigns them roles such as
curator, approver or member. See the Workflows example
for the roles used in the default workflows.
Fill in the curation policy
The owner writes the community’s curation policy describing what the community accepts and what depositors must do before submitting.
Curation policy
Every community should define a curation policy — a human-readable statement of the rules for depositing records into that community. It answers questions such as:
- What kind of records does this community accept (subject, type, scope)?
- What metadata quality and completeness is expected?
The curation policy serves two purposes:
-
Guidance for depositors. It is the depositor’s responsibility to read the curation policy before submitting a record to the community, so they understand the community’s rules up front and can prepare a compliant submission.
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Input for automated (LLM) checks. The policy text can be used by automated curation checks (if this feature is supported by a given repository) to evaluate whether a submitted record conforms to the community’s stated rules, and to give the depositor and curator early feedback.
Because the curation policy feeds automated checks, write it as clear, concrete, verifiable rules rather than vague aspirations. For example, prefer “Records must include at least one author with an ORCID and a license from the approved list” over “Please provide good metadata.”
Writing an effective policy
- Be specific and testable — state concrete requirements, not general intentions..
- Keep it up to date as the community’s workflow or scope changes.