The DSA originally came from the social science and humanities communities, led by Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in the Netherlands, but it is applicable across all sectors.

The DSA aims to provide a low barrier to entry for depositors with minimal additional costs. Repositories seeking the DSA assess themselves against the guidelines and are then peer-reviewed by a previous recipient of the DSA. The emerging community guidelines surrounding the DSA provide scalability through ongoing participation of community members.

As well as offering a public statement of compliance (which in turn supports further adoption of good practice), the DSA has the wider goal of promoting good practice in data management and sharing.

In contrast to the ISO and DIN standards, there is no audit process or site visit - just a review on the basis of trust resulting in a clear, public statement of the process undertaken.

The UK Data Archive has been involved in the creation of the DSA. We have self-assessed against the DSA with an external organisation checking that our self-assessment was honest and reliable.