Data stewardship is an emerging professional field that supports researchers in managing, preserving, and sharing research data according to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open science principles. In Hungary, this role has recently become institutionalized through coordinated educational and community-building initiatives. The first formal postgraduate data steward training program was launched at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 2023, providing interdisciplinary education that combines technical, legal, and research data management skills.

Compliance with FAIR principles is becoming an unavoidable factor in multiple research areas, that Hungarian researchers also face in their publishing activities. These principles primarily aim to ensure that the data supporting research can be located and processed using computational tools, even without human intervention. Storing and providing metadata for research data in a traditional data repository is a progressive step.

The work presented in this paper is twofold. On the one hand, we aim to define the concept of semantic artefact catalogue (SAC) by overviewing various definitions used to clarify the meaning of our target of observation, including the meaning of the focal item: semantic artefacts. On the other hand, we aim to identify metrics and dimensions that can be used to assess the maturity of such catalogues.

In 2021, the three most active HRDA member institutions of ELKH, SZTAKI, the Centre for Social Sciences and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, received financial support from ELKH to implement a project that will create the infrastructural environment for data-driven research in ELKH institutions and actively contribute to the development and dissemination of a FAIR culture of data-driven research. On 1 November 2021, ELKH launched the ELKH Data Repository Platform (ELKH ARP) project with a total funding of around HUF 500 million.

LKH ARP Research Data Repository project aims to establish a central data repository system supporting the whole ELKH research network, providing research data repository and related, integrated data- and metadata-management services.

​Access to the data sets that underpin scientific results, making them publicly available and searchable for further research can not only promote the development of a given field of science but also open the door to interdisciplinary and international research, which is nowadays increasingly becoming a basic principle, an expectation, and sometimes a requirement. The publication and storage of data related to scientific publications is often done in an ad-hoc manner but this has a number of drawbacks.

How to build a data repository? What does a data repository need to know and how should we find out about it? What are the difficulties and how prepared are the potential users?

Within the ELKH ARP, we conducted a non-representative survey on the data management policies of the journals preferred by ELKH researchers. Neither the disciplines nor the publishers’ own practices show uniformity in the management of scientific data published in their journals. Although the long-established publishers try to follow FAIR principles, there is no uniform policy yet, and some journals do not have strict requirements for open access to cited data at all. The complexity and diversity of scientific data also makes it challenging for authors to store and make them accessible.