Jared Lyle, Executive Director, DDI Alliance, at ICPSR, University of Michigan said: "I want to thank Libby for accepting the nomination and for her willingness to serve on the Board. I also want to thank Achim Wackerow for his many years of service on the DDI Executive Board."

Dr Libby Bishop is Coordinator for International Data Infrastructures in the Data Archive for the Social Sciences at GESIS Leibniz-Institute for Social Sciences in Germany.

Dr Bishop said: "I am delighted to have been elected. I believe that my international network will be useful for engaging with global digital research infrastructures. I look forward to working with all of you."

More information:

Dr Libby Bishop is the Coordinator for International Data Infrastructures in the Data Archive for the Social Sciences at GESIS Leibniz-Institute for Social Sciences in Germany. She manages the relationship between GESIS and CESSDA, and leads a project that is building a resource for repository staff.

Read the full news story on the DDI Alliance website.

We invite you to discover this new online data catalogue: https://data.progedo.fr.

You can find below a step by step introduction to the new data catalogue.

More information:

Read the news and see the presentation in French.

DASSI (Data Archive Social Sciences Italy) is a Joint Research Unit composed of the Italian National Research Council (CNR) and the University of Milano Bicocca.

The University of Milano-Bicocca’s unit is based in the Interdepartmental Centre UniData – Bicocca Data Archive, that is a joint project coming from eight departments of the University.

The project aims to create a centre for excellence in data sharing, enhance the secondary analysis and to promote the responsible use of data in social, economic, and environmental science studies.

• When did your country become a member?

Italy became a CESSDA member in July 2021.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

Italy has a long experience of collaboration with CESSDA, since its foundation. Italy participated in CESSDA PPP and CESSDA SaW EU-funded projects.

Staff at various research institutions have stayed up to date with CESSDA activities and have participated in e.g., CESSDA Widening workshops, one of them co-organised with CESSDA in Milan in 2018. They have also been preparing for membership, which was reached in 2021.

The national service provider DASSI has built up solid technical and archiving skills which were developed in a challenging national context. It is only in recent years that the data culture, especially when it comes to sharing data, has found its rightful place. DASSI brings this knowledge and experience to the CESSDA community.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

As a CESSDA member, Italy is recognised at an international level for its work on data archiving for social science research. Firstly, participation in a European Research Infrastructure guarantees high standards in the way we perform our work at a national level. Secondly, CESSDA membership increases our reputation and helps us to gain the trust of researchers. We can then grow our user community.

Our staff at DASSI can improve their skills in many different areas of research data and learn from peers across Europe. The collaboration between archives and involvement in CESSDA activities brings with it a wealth of opportunities for professional development.
Being able to participate in European projects is also an excellent opportunity to boost the quality of the services that we offer our users.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

Our organisation is interested (and is already participating) in activities related to the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the CESSDA Vocabulary Service.

Given the services that DASSI wants to implement in the future, we are also interested in the CESSDA European Question Bank, access to sensitive data, and in research data management.

• The CESSDA Data Catalogue provides direct access to metadata of CESSDA service provider data. What is the most useful, desired, or FAIR dataset that the CESSDA Data Catalogue will facilitate cross-European access to?

The goal in the coming months is to ensure greater international dissemination of the data produced by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (Istat). These surveys are widely used by the Italian community.

However, they are often poorly described, especially from the point of view of FAIR principles. There are, at the time of writing, over 100 Istat studies in English in the CESSDA Data Catalogue!

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

Even though we have been using the DDI standard for several years, the current distribution platform does not allow for FAIR compliance. Thanks to the support of CESSDA, and its training activities, we are now working to move our data to a new platform. Dataverse will allow for improved "fairness" of the data.

With the help of CESSDA service providers, and in particular FSD, we have been able to add our studies to the CESSDA Data Catalogue. There are over 1,700 studies from Italy in the CESSDA Data Catalogue! This makes our data more easily accessible to the international community.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

Our staff recommend training opportunities in data management, especially anonymisation and qualitative data ingest (see CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide).

Learning how to use specific tools for data distribution and analysis are also key areas for us. CESSDA training activities help us respond to the needs of our users and allow us to implement new services. Other relevant training areas are new kinds of data, such as social media and big data.

We regularly check the CESSDA training website for training webinars and events.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2022?

We are already part of the CESSDA mentorship programme 2021–22. FORS, in Switzerland, is helping us to define all the necessary documentation to carry out our core activities as a CESSDA service provider. We will most likely need support in configuring our deployment platform (Dataverse) in the coming months.

More information:

Contact DASSI.

Read the last article in this series about the UK Data Service.

The UK Data Service provides researchers with support, training and access to the UK’s largest collection of social, economic and population data. It is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The UK Data Service (UKDS) was established in 2012 as a strategic partnership between the Universities of Essex, Manchester, Southampton, UCL, Edinburgh and Jisc to provide a comprehensive international service to meet the current and future digital needs of researchers, data users and data owners from all sectors.

The UK Data Archive (UKDA), lead partner of the UK Data Service, was established in 1967 and is based at the University of Essex. Our practices, especially around data curation and secure access to data, have been influential across the world for over 50 years.

• When did your country become a member?

The UKDA, now lead partner of UKDS, has been a member since 1976, when CESSDA was first established as a European umbrella organisation for national social science data archives.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

As one of the founding members, UKDS has helped to develop and shape CESSDA since its inception. Our expertise in research data management, data archiving and curation, metadata management and development, and researcher and professional training is our biggest contribution.

The UKDS participates in projects across CESSDA and manages the CESSDA ELSST service. Our ongoing activities include the Metadata Office project, the Training Pillar, SSHOC, EOSC and CESSDA Trust. We also support CESSDA communications by coordinating input for the monthly CESSDA newsletter and by participating in the CESSDA Communications Group.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

Active membership of the CESSDA network has been crucial to the development of the UKDS as a data organisation of international renown. It has enabled us to lead and contribute to the development of international standards in data curation and management.

The professional co-operation and the sharing of expertise across the international data landscape that CESSDA provides helps us to utilise new data infrastructure developments to benefit researchers.

Providing our data records for inclusion in the CESSDA Data Catalogue enables us to improve access to international data for UK researchers and to reach potential new international users.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

The tools and services which are most of interest to us are those aimed at service providers.

These are for example:

• CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide and Data Archiving Guide;
• CESSDA Vocabulary Service;
• European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST); and
• CESSDA Resource Directory.

We also provide our records for harvesting to the CESSDA Data Catalogue and find this a valuable resource for all users.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide provides excellent advice on how to manage data and plan for secondary use. It encourages researchers to create rich, well-managed data compliant to GDPR with good supporting documentation and metadata.

Therefore, it helps to build in FAIRness from the start by helping researchers create a data resource that is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

CESSDA supports the creation of tools that increase FAIR compliance via projects and services it funds, and encourages service providers to share these tools openly with others, by means of the CESSDA Resource Directory.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is a good introduction to data management, and we encourage both users and new and existing staff to use it.

We also regularly check the CESSDA training website to find events such as training webinars and resources of benefit to staff and users, and follow CESSDA social media to keep up with the latest event announcements.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2022?

The research funding support that CESSDA provides is crucial. Service providers can share expertise in a supportive research environment, working together across international boundaries. Together, they develop new, improved and FAIR tools and services to enhance research data infrastructures.

CESSDA is also a strong advocate for service providers and data archiving in general, and plays a key role alongside the other ERICs in building and strengthening European research infrastructure.

More information:

Contact UKDS.

Read the last article in this series about SND – Swedish National Data Service.

The EOSC Platform Early Adopter Programme (EOSC Platform EAP) aims to foster a culture of cooperation among researchers and providers within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The hands-on format of the programme will equip research communities and service providers with expert knowledge and resources, covering different services and e-infrastructures.

Beyond this in-kind support, programme participants will play an active role in EOSC development, helping to create an EOSC that serves the actual needs of European research communities in all domains.

What’s in it for you?

Selected applicants will be grouped into ‘Early Adopter Projects’ with well-defined work plans and objectives (e.g. onboarding a service in EOSC, running a data analysis workflow, etc.).

Each project can have a duration of 3, 6 or 12 months.

The Early Adopter Projects will get the support they need in terms of:

• accessing technical services and resources throughout the project’s entire research life cycle
• receiving technical support from EOSC Future experts and project partners to identify, access and use the services and resources
• onboarding services to the EOSC Marketplace and making services more visible to the broader EOSC community
• benefitting from EOSC services (i.e. AAI, helpdesk, monitoring, accounting, etc.).

Please note: The programme aims to provide technical support; however, this does not include direct financial support to applicants.

Who should apply?

• providers looking to integrate their services into EOSC and, in turn, make them available to the research community at large
• research communities working to address cross-disciplinary, societal or complex research challenges with the help of EOSC resources from different disciplines or e-infrastructures

Apply now

Applications are already open for the EOSC Platform EAP.

Find out more here.

N.B.: A cut-off date for the 1^st round of Early Adopter Projects is set for 15 May 2022. Applicants who submitted applications will be informed of the evaluation committee's decision within 1 month.

DARISS is made up of a data management support team and a team that manages the archiving and dissemination of data. The latter is called the Data archive services (DAS), which is the counterpart of PROGEDO’s ADISP.

ADISP's mission is to distribute the surveys and databases produced by official statistics to the scientific community (researchers and students). It also ensures the dissemination of quantitative research data in the social sciences.

Exchanges of best practices between neighbours

This visit between Service Providers takes place in the context of strengthening the move towards open research data.

Historically, ADISP is responsible for disseminating data from official statistics. With over 20 years’ experience, ADISP wanted to make this service available to researchers who wish to disseminate their quantitative data, particularly pseudonymised data.

The DARISS teams were already used to working with researchers. Lorraine Adam was particularly interested in learning about good practices and how the teams support researchers in the social sciences and humanities. For example, when it comes to sharing and anonymising data.

This visit provided an opportunity to share practices and services offered by the two institutions. There are many similarities, of course. They both follow DDI standards in their documentation, they share the FAIR data principles, and a desire for open data which guides how they work. One core difference is that DARISS supports researchers directly, whereas PROGEDO uses its university data platforms to reach researchers.

Swissubase and Quetelet-PROGEDO dissemination

Although the visit to Lausanne was affected by the COVID-19 health crisis, it did coincide with the launch of the new Swissubase portal. The portal displays 11,000 project descriptions going back to 1993, some of which include the produced data sets.

This launch happened just a few weeks ahead of the new Quetelet-PROGEDO catalogue. This new catalogue is made up of data from ADISP, the National Institute of Demographic Studies (L’Institut national d’études démographiques – Ined) and from Sciences Po Paris. This new catalogue will soon be available and harvested by the CESSDA Data Catalogue.

What do you take away from your visit to Lausanne?

Lorraine Adam said: “What left an impression on me was the support offered to researchers, particularly the guides written by the teams. These are a tool that we will also be offering in the coming months, and which will complement the field support provided by the fifteen University Data Platforms. I was made aware that the key to success is to be a partner for researchers in the process of making data open.”

An article by Elodie Pétorin and translated by Eleanor Smith

More information:

Read the original article in French.

The General Assembly appointed Dr Wolff-Boenisch after a unanimous vote in February 2022.

Helena Laaksonen, Chair of the General Assembly, said: “I am delighted to welcome Dr Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch to the CESSDA community. Her leadership and advocacy background in the European science and funding landscape makes her a perfect candidate for leading CESSDA for the coming five years.”

Matthias Reiter-Pázmándy, Vice-Chair of the General Assembly, said: “As Chair of the Search and Recruitment Committee, I was happy to see the high interest in the Director position and the impressive expertise of the candidates. The applicants went through a thorough assessment process, and I congratulate Dr Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch for the new position as Director of CESSDA.”

Dr Wolff-Boenisch contributed to the establishment of the international non-profit organisation Science Europe, which brings together the expertise of some of the largest and best-known research and research funding organisations in the world.

As Head of the Research Affairs division for the last nine years, she was responsible for setting and implementing strategic objectives for all research disciplines, including the social sciences. She led projects of high importance linked to changes in the research system, provided scientific advice for science policies and advocacy, and leveraged international and interdisciplinary multi-stakeholder networks from academia, industry, the European Institutions and Member States.

Before joining Science Europe in 2012, Dr Wolff-Boenisch led an EU-funded European Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) project at the European Science Foundation-Science Connect in Strasbourg, France. She did a PhD in Geochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and received an Executive Master in Management from ICHEC Brussels Management School.

Dr Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch said: “I am thrilled to join CESSDA in these exciting times. I am very much looking forward to getting to know CESSDA’s member organisations and partners. The organisation has a lot to offer to the social science research community, and beyond, and I intend to make sure that its services meet the needs of researchers. I will use my expertise to build on CESSDA’s successes and continue to promote the results of social science research to a wider audience.”

Dr Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch follows Ron Dekker, whose mandate ended on 28 February. She will be based at the main office in Bergen joining a team of twelve staff members.

More information:

Dr Bonnie Wolff-Boenisch’s profile on LinkedIn and on ResearchGate.

Following the attack, CESSDA has reached out to its Ukrainian partner institution offering help and support. Partnership with the Russian data archive has been suspended and Russia removed from the list of partners on the website.

CESSDA would like to express its respect to Russian researchers around the world who are protesting and speaking out against the invasion of Ukraine.

CESSDA wishes to express its solidarity to everyone affected by the horror of war and to all scholars and scientists in the region.

During the hour-long session, participants will be able to ask questions and discuss a variety of EOSC services and resources.

Each session takes place online from 14.00-15.00 CET.

You can register here.

More dates and topics are coming throughout 2022-2023. Eventually, the webinars will cover all resource categories on the EOSC portal.

Ask me anything about…

The EOSC Future ‘ask me anything’ webinars aim to encourage uptake among users as well as show potential service providers how their resources could be featured through EOSC.

For each session, EOSC community members, experts and project coordinators will present an EOSC resource.

As needed, there will be a demonstrative use case to show how a specific type of resource can be accessed and used via the platform. For all webinars, particular emphasis will be placed on answering any and all questions from the audience.

Visit the EOSC Future website for updates on upcoming webinar topics and dates.

"As the CESSDA community grew, we shifted our focus to improving our communication with existing members. On tools and services, we stabilised as well. Instead of developing new tools, we focused on the sustainability of existing core tools. We organised targeted webinars on the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide." – Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

The CESSDA Annual Report 2020 covers strategic, operational, strategic, and technical activities and results, as well as communications, projects, governance and management. It presents the financial information of the past year and a future perspective.

This year, we decided once more to ask a local artist, Clémence Mérouze, to create unique illustrations for this report. It is our way of showing support for the arts sector during the COVID-19 crisis.

All of our annual reports can be consulted here.

• "An overview of the diversity of copyright protection in different European jurisdictions has been prepared by CESSDA." (p. 34)
• "CESSDA's resource page on informed consent describes examples of ‘granular consent’." (p. 37)

"We hope this report and the recommendations herein can form a useful knowledge basis and tool for future work on legal and practical aspects of data sharing. Furthermore, we hope it can help to encourage responsible sharing and re-use of research data in a way that also safeguards considerations for research ethics, data protection and other issues described in this report." – Jan Magnus Aronsen, Chair of the Committee on sharing and reuse of research data.

Read the final report in English: How should we share research data? Report and recommendations relating to licensing and making research data available (PDF).

More information:

Find out more about the work of the Committee.

Last month, SND had a visitor from the Icelandic data repository DATICE, located at the University of Iceland. For the past two years, Örnólfur Thorlacius has been responsible for DATICE and their efforts to make Icelandic social science research data more accessible.

"Our operations began to really develop this last year. We’ve got our own Dataverse system for data descriptions, we’ve migrated all datasets to Dataverse, we’ve had staff working with data management, and have also started working on the Icelandic version of ELSST, a thesaurus for the social sciences, says Örnólfur.

Learning from other Nordic countries

DATICE is a Service Provider in the European Research Infrastructure CESSDA.

SND is the Icelandic repository's mentor through the CESSDA Mentorship Programme 2021–2022. The programme will also include tailor-made Dataverse training, provided by the Dutch repository DANS. (...)

What important knowledge have you gained during your visit to Sweden?

One of the hands-on advice that Örnólfur Thorlacius takes away from his visit to Sweden is to work with handbooks and guides, such as the wiki that SND has developed for the SND network. (...)

Read the full article on the SND website.

Highlights on CESSDA DC® and DMEG®

Jan Dalsten, currently head of the department for Communication of Archival Data, Danish National Archives gave a deep dive into discovering Danish data sources: CESSDA Data Catalogue® - Discovery of Danish Datasets related to the Circular Economy.

Johana Chylíková, a Post-doctorate at the Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA), walked participants through the CESSDA DMEG: Data Management Expert Guide - Organise and Process. Collectively, these presentations served as practical information on the wealth of data available in CESSDA through its Data Catalogue® and DMEG®, which can also be used by other disciplines, such as economics or biology to help support an interdisciplinary approach.

User stories

The Roadshow featured two inspirational user stories on circular economy research. The first came from Konstantinos Tsagarakis, Professor of Economics of Environmental Science and Technology at the Technical University of Crete: Use Case on Circular Economy - A View on Societal Impacts and Priorities.

The second came from Ana Slavec, Consulting statistician and researcher at InnoRenew CoE Renewable Materials and Healthy Environments Research and Innovation Centre of Excellence: Challenges with the Reuse of Data on Circular Economy - Experience of Researchers at InnoReview.

Takeaways

With over 140 definitions of Circular Economy in the literature, it would be important to have a community definition. This would help ensure data collection is effective in gaining insights on what triggers real change, such as understanding if a change in legislation is because of a change in attitudes in the electorate or a prerequisite for changing people’s attitudes. That type of research would really help us understand the interlink between people’s views and the policies enacted. Education is needed at all levels, from primary schools to universities so we have the same understanding about circularity.

Interdisciplinary cooperation is a key aspect here but it has to be done before the data collection with consensus on the new terminology and on formulating questions so we are clear about what exactly information we’re asking for.

CESSDA is making an important contribution to research in the social sciences through its data and metadata collection, shedding light on people’s attitudes towards recycling as an environmental good practice, including self-reported behaviour.

The CESSDA archives can themselves be seen as reflecting circular economy principles by preserving data created for reuse so others can “recycle” it and benefit from insights already made. This is also effective in reducing the amount of time spent collecting data by optimising data sources that already exist.

What would be useful are datasets that help us understand if there are gaps between attitudes and reported behaviour as opposed to what actually happens. Decisions made by enterprises can also have a significant impact so this also needs to be assessed, for example, understanding business motivations and consumer reactions. This would make CESSDA’s contribution even better. Surveys combined with government data can both help research on the circular economy.

Concerted efforts are also important for enhancing the metadata from national statistical offices and making it available to a wider pool of researchers. Equally important are the use cases like the ones emerging from the Roadshow series are also an important channel for others to get inspiration and learn from the experiences of other researchers. CESSDA is very well placed to be at the forefront of cooperation and interdisciplinary approaches to research on the Circular Economy.

On-demand Resources

Download the overview, slide deck and full recording on ZENODO.

The CESSDA community and newcomers can re-use all the recorded resources on the Training via the YouTube Playlist for the Roadshow on Circular Economy.

A news item by Trust-IT

Demos, flash talks and interactive discussions also highlighted the importance of secure access to data, storage and protection when dealing with sensitive data related to health.

Highlights on CESSDA DC® and DMEG®

Alle Bloom, Research Associate with the UK Data Service at the University of Manchester, gave a demo on how to discover the resources in the CESSDA DC®: Discovery at national and European levels.

Gry-Hege Henriksen, Data manager and Special Adviser, Data Protection Service at NSD, the Norwegian Centre for Research Data, walked participants through the CESSDA DMEG®:

Store and Protect with the CESSDA Data Management Guide®.

User stories

The Roadshow featured three inspirational user stories enabled by CESSDA. The first came from Patty Doran, Research Associate in the Urban Ageing Research Group at the University of Manchester, shared her research findings: Resilience and living well beyond cancer: the relationship between emotional support and quality of life.

The second user story was a joint presentation from the Centre for Longitudinal Studies at University College London, Danielle Freitas Gomes and Karen Dennison, Records Linkage Managers and Nasir Raja, Research Fellow. They zoomed in on storing and protecting sensitive health data: Use case on Center for Longitudinal Studies - how to store and how to protect.

Beate Lichtwardt, Senior User Support and Training Officer at the UK Data Service, shared her expertise on secure data access: Use case on The Five Safes framework for accessing sensitive data via the SecureLab at UK Data Service.

Takeaways

Combining social data with administrative data reveals key trends about cancer and other chronic diseases, enabling much deeper insights while also saving money. There is a huge potential to conduct research on many different variables, such as emotional support, with a wealth of data in social surveys showing how people are really affected by cancer and other health conditions in both the short and long terms.

Researchers need access to high-quality data on diverse facets of healthcare, including comparisons across countries. Trusted archives enable researchers to easily discover the data, interrogate it and use it. This in turn helps generate evidence-based research at national and international level, also in terms of enabling informed decision making from a policy standpoint.

Service provider support plays a central role as they have in-depth knowledge about their data and can also offer practical support to researchers while imparting best practices on data management, including GDPR compliance. There are also other ways where service providers can assist, such as dealing with data in different formats and applying for secure data access on top of all the training resources available.

Interconnecting researchers is also important as it allows them to discover all other datasets that could yield insights, unleashing the potential for new datasets to enrich investigations. It is important to keep highlighting the wealth of data available.

On-demand Resources

Download the overview, slide deck and full recording on ZENODO.

The CESSDA.eu community and newcomers can re-use all the recorded resources on the Training via the YouTube Playlist for the Roadshow on Cancer and Chronic Diseases.

A news item by Trsut-IT

Researchers then shared their first-hand experiences in using the CESSDA® Data Catalogue and re-using data from related studies, highlighting benefits also for cross-disciplinary research.

Flash talks served as a springboard for the interactive discussions with invited panelists and participants, sharing diverse viewpoints from service providers and members of the social sciences community in the context of CESSDA.

Highlights on CESSDA DC® and DMEG®

Tuomas J. Alaterä, Information Network Specialist at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) walked participants through the data related to climate change in the CESSDA Data Catalogue: CESSDA DC® for Climate Change: An overview of Datasets in Finnish and English Datasets for Discovery.

Patrícia Miranda, Data Manager at APIS, the Portuguese Archive of Social Information based at the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, delved into the value of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide when it comes to archiving and publishing research data: CESSDA DMEG® on Archive & Publish.

User Stories

The three user stories featured in the Roadshow were directly inspired by the support of service providers in Finland and Portugal, giving examples of how researchers have also built on each other’s work and data re-use. First off was Luís Junqueira, junior researcher at the Methodology Innovation Lab, CIES-IUL and an associated researcher at the Shift Research Group with his experiences on publishing data and the all-important metadata: CESSDA User story on the importance of publishing data and organizing (meta)data.

Next up was Vasco Ramos, Research Fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. His story focused on re-using data for cross-disciplinary research on climate change: CESSDA User Story on the importance and the benefits of reuse of data in cross-disciplinary research.

Last but not least was Harri Melin, Professor of Sociology at Tampere University, highlighting the value of CESSDA in supporting research through the wealth of data available at the national level: A CESSDA DC® User story, insights from Finland.

Takeaways

It is essential that research on climate change reaches a wider audience, such as decision makers and the private sector, including small companies that can benefit from the data available. CESSDA members can bring value by making these connections.

Having more data and more reliable data on climate change is critical for enabling new research and distributing it across all relevant stakeholders, where CESSDA has the opportunity to engage with a much wider audience.

Some of the questions on climate change have been asked for a long time but with different terminology as this is an evolving landscape. The theoretical viewpoint may also be different but these are all valuable sources of information for other researchers. Having a good grasp of the data is important with service provider support pointing to relevant metadata so researchers find the chunks of data that haven’t been used.

Data quality is key for both cross-disciplinary and comparative cross-national research because we need data based on worldwide knowledge for research on this global challenge. In this respect, comparative studies are fundamentally important.

Metadata deposits are much easier to re-use as it sets researchers on the right track, leveraging the solid support of the national service providers. Researchers can make valuable comparisons of the analyses already done and avoid duplicating data collections. Using insights from others also saves time.

Service provider support is an essential part of the research workflow. For example, APIS has enabled researchers to find relevant data and metadata for their studies, but beyond this, they help prepare them for the road ahead, highlighting the importance of open data, how the various procedures work, ensuring they have controlled vocabularies at hand so the research can be conducted in a very detailed manner. This is a circular process from start to finish, ensuring data is findable and accessible to others so they can benefit from it.

The user story from Luis Junqueira is an excellent example of building on top of research done by others, knowing not only what data is available but also how to use the resources to best effect. CESSDA has come up trumps with the DMEG as it really supports the research workflow from discovery to publication. Hence, this is all part of the CESSDA DMEG® journey, starting with discovery, and of the end-to-end researcher experience through the entire data lifecycle in well-organised chapters with questions to check understanding around data management plans. APIS has also translated DMEG into Portuguese the data to help national researchers organise the data they want to use and make it findable and accessible to others.

To re-use data, it needs to be published. Researchers can easily tap into the DMEG questions on publishing and archiving through trusted repositories like CESSDA. Researchers must properly cite data, to sources and original authors to maximise the impacts of data dissemination through the correct attributions.

On-demand Resources

Download the overview, slide deck and full recording on ZENODO.

The CESSDA community and newcomers can re-use all the recorded resources on the Training via the YouTube Playlist for the Roadshow on Climate Change.

A news item by Trust-IT

Interactive discussions underscored the importance of data quality and transparency and cross-border research in delivering tangible societal impacts on migration and mobility, which can also inform civil society and policymakers through evidence-based research.

Highlights on CESSDA DC® and DMEG®

The CESSDA DC® has over 3000 datasets on migration and minorities, searchable and documented in 14 European languages with rich metadata that facilitates cross-disciplinary research all from a single access point. The tutorial on the CESSDA Data Catalogue® for Migration and Discovery came from Dimitra Kondyli, Research Director at the National Centre for Social Sciences (EKKE) in Greece.

Peter Čerče, Head of the Centre for IT and Infrastructural Support to Research at the Science and Research Centre Koper as well as its Research Library, explained how he used the CESSDA DMEG® to produce his own data management plan in his role of Data Officer in the EU-funded project on Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MiCreate), also with a view of protecting the highly sensitive data emerging from research: CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide® & Data Catalogue® for Users.

User Stories

Ami Saji, SciencesPo and researcher for the SSHOC (Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud) Project, coordinating the development of the Ethnic and Migrant Monitory (EMM) survey registry. She highlighted the key role of service providers in relation to this work and the CESSDA.eu DC®: Ethnic and Migrant Minority Survey Registry & CESSDA Data Catalogue® for Discovery.

Dimitri Prandner from the Empirical Social Research Unit at the Johannes Kepler University, shared his personal experiences on the challenges revolving around ethnic and migrant minorities at both national and European level: Migrant Minorities and Survey Research. Reusing the EMM Survey Registry.

Ahmed Wali, a PhD researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, brought perspectives from the European HumMingBird project under Horizon 2020, which focuses on improving the mapping and understanding of changing migration flows: Challenges in international migration statistics.

Meredith Winn, a postdoctoral researcher at Sciences Po working on the ANR-funded FAIRETHMIGQUANT Project, a research network aiming to improve access, usability, and dissemination of quantitative survey data on the economic, social, and political integration of ethnic and migrant minorities: Ethnic & Migrant Minority Question Databank. Reusing the EMM Survey Registry.

Takeaways

CESSDA enables researchers to find trusted data sources as a first step in defining a project or research roadmap. The European Language Thesaurus is another important tool for using and reusing the datasets, helping researchers navigate diverse terms and concepts related to the datasets.

Data quality and transparency are thus core values the social sciences bring to the public debate on migration. Migration is an excellent example of a global challenge where research findings, such as comparisons between policy and scientific data, can be used to inform policymakers and civil society activists outside the core CESSDA community.

The network of CESSDA service providers is instrumental in connecting researchers carrying out research at both national and cross-national levels, helping them also deal with sensitive data through the good practices in the DMEG. For example, several service providers, such as GESIS and AUSSDA, have been involved in the entire workflow for the process of the EMM Survey Repository, helping to add value to it. These and other service providers have also played a key role in structuring the metadata, ensuring it is interoperable, based on recommended standards for the social sciences and in knowing which licences to apply for both the tool and the metadata to maximise their usability.

Being able to contact service providers for support is a key value proposition, guiding researchers on their journey, whether they want to build on existing research questions or bring in new ones. This helps save time and build economies of scale.

On-demand Resources

Download the overview, slide deck and full recording on ZENODO.

The CESSDA community and newcomers can re-use all the recorded resources on the Training via the YouTube Playlist for the CESSDA Roadshow on Migration.

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Participants were also given a lowdown on how to use the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide® (DMEG) for archiving, fast-track publication and collaboration to make the research workflow smoother and more effective.

Insights into societal impacts came from both a CESSDA COVID-19 Ambassador, Helena Laaksonen, Director of Finnish Social Science Data Archive, and Dr Giulia Malaguarnera, representing Eurodoc, the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers. The Roadshow wrapped-up with more interactive discussions on how CESSDA and its service providers are supporting researchers on global challenges like COVID-19.

Highlights on CESSDA DC® and DMEG®

Alle Bloom, Research Associate with the UK Data Service at the University of Manchester, gave a demo on how to discover the resources in the CESSDA DC®. Tutorial: Places to find COVID data and what data is available & Demo on how to search the CESSDA DC®

Ricarda Braukmann, Data Station Manager at the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) explained how the CESSDA DMEG® guides researchers to fast-track publication and collaboration. Tutorial: CESSDA DMEG® - Data Discovery, Archiving and Publication Routes, European Diversity.

Dr Braukmann was also joined by Otto Bodi-Fernandez, AUSSDA local contact point at the University of Graz. Together, they showed How CESSDA DMEG® supports publication in the social sciences.

User Stories

Two inspirational user stories showcased the value of data use and re-use enabled by CESSDA. The first came from Julia Partheymüller, Senior Scientist at the Department of Government at the University of Vienna and part of the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP). Key cross-disciplinary insights are captured in The Austrian Corona Panel Project: monitoring individual and societal dynamics amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Watch the recorded story with Julia Partheymüller.

The second user story came from three researchers at the University of Trento, Anna Zamberlan, Filippo Gioachin, Davide Gritti, who used data available in the UK Data Archive, and discoverable via the CESSDA DC® as the basis for their research paper entitled Work less, help out more? The persistence of gender inequality in housework and childcare during UK COVID-19, Anna Zamberlan, Filippo Gioachin, Davide Gritti, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Volume 73, 2021.

Takeaways

The CESSDA DC® is a treasure trove for the social sciences with over 30,000 datasets available. 2020 marked a major milestone with the inclusion of COVID-19 datasets and metadata from national data archives, surveys, administrative and government data and gender-related studies as new entries from 13 national service providers. Collectively, these datasets bring multiple insights into the many societal impacts ripe for investigation, reuse and citation in the social sciences.

The data available has enabled research on behavioural aspects during the pandemic, such as impacts on employment and the division of domestic chores over time. The surveys have a broad scope at the intersection of diverse disciplines, from economics to psychology, bringing insights into behaviour previously not covered or not given so much weight as is the case with the pandemic, revealing just how important it is. Research has also brought to light new insights into the role of open science in disciplines like the social sciences, with a focus on transparency and openness, citizen reactions versus policy decisions, where data needs to be anonymised to protect privacy along the legislative principle “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”.

Service providers have been quick to adapt to the impacts of the pandemic, which is generating a lot of new data, which has to be archived very quickly and so has increased the workload but has also led to new data collections. Otto Bodi-Fernandez explained how AUSSDA has set up a new workflow for fast-track publishing, which could be extended to other research themes. AUSSDA has also implemented a set of security checks for staff working from home as part of a more structured approach to efficient meetings and more inclusive discussions.

In Finland, the demand for data at the Social Science Data Archive has skyrocketed and this trend continues in 2021 though it remains to see what changes may occur in the future. Like Austria, the shift to remote working was very swift with positive attitudes towards carrying out many tasks remotely provided the network and IT system are properly protected, as highlighted by Helena Laaksonen from FSD. This is unlikely to change in the future. However, because CESSDA is a concerted effort, members also need to meet physically to coordinate activities across countries.

On-demand Resources

Download the overview, slide deck and full recording on ZENODO

The CESSDA community and newcomers from the Roadshow series can re-use all the recorded resources on the Training YouTube Playlist for COVID-19

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Funded by the Irish Research Council, the Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA), based at University College Dublin, will act as the Irish national service provider for the consortium.

It will lead on integrating data generated in Ireland into the overall research infrastructure of CESSDA. ISSDA will also play a significant outreach role in publicising data sets, providing training nationally to the research community on data visualisation, and promoting literacy regarding quantitative data.

Quotes

Director of the Irish Research Council, Peter Brown said: “Ireland’s membership of CESSDA is significant as it ensures we are contributing to high-quality research on a European stage and facilitating collaboration and the sharing of ideas between our social science researchers here in Ireland and their peers across Europe.

“Ireland is a leader in high-quality research in the social sciences, and in the age of open research, it is vitally important that this work is recognised and accessible not just nationally, but internationally. With ISSDA at the helm as the national service provider for the consortium, we will solidify our position as part of the European research infrastructure and provide access for social science researchers to thousands of important data sets.”

Head of ISSDA, Professor John Howard said: “With funding for ISSDA as Ireland’s national service provider for CESSDA, and myself named as National Coordinator, ISSDA is now poised to expand its services, to integrate its technical systems with those of CESSDA, and facilitate broader engagement of Irish social scientists with the vast universe of European social sciences data. I am grateful to the Irish Research Council for its role in supporting ISSDA in the past and into the future.”

Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA said: “I am delighted to welcome Ireland’s membership of CESSDA, sponsored by the Irish Research Council. I am also delighted to welcome the Irish Social Science Data Archive as a new National Service Provider for CESSDA. I am sure that being a part of the CESSDA community will contribute to their mission in several meaningful ways for researchers.

By being a part of CESSDA, Ireland’s social science community is joining forces with over twenty European counterparts. It will be able to share its expertise, learn from others and participate in internal and European funded projects. The CESSDA Data Catalogue will make sure that Irish quantitative datasets and international comparative studies are findable and reusable for researchers abroad. Welcome on board!”

More information

Read the full news item on the Irish Research Council website.

Currently, CESSDA’s services to the academic community and even wider audiences include the largest social sciences and humanities data catalogue, as well as an encompassing guide to research data management. CESSDA’s Europe-wide trusted service provider network, in 23 member countries, offers its expertise to national and international communities in preserving, opening, and sharing research data in a responsible manner and complying with the FAIR principles.

Helena Laaksonen, Chair of the General Assembly, thanked Ron Dekker and said: “Ron has done an excellent job of building up the main office and establishing CESSDA as a key player in the field of social science data in Europe. I am looking forward to receiving strong applications from potential candidates for the next five-year period!”.

Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA said: “I am proud of the position of CESSDA in Europe and to have led CESSDA through its first five years as an ERIC. We have developed new products, services, and standards together with our Service Providers and we participate in many European initiatives including EOSC. I will be looking forward to following CESSDA’s successes in the future!”.

More information:

Director’s Vacancy Announcement

CESSDA Data Catalogue

CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide

CESSDA Consortium

CESSDA’s project involvement

The director is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Scientific Officer and legal representative of CESSDA ERIC, leading the team and organisation.

Find out more about the position:

Expected start

March 2022

Access – to data, interoperable resources, outputs – is a key pillar of the EOSC Future project. This entails making sure researchers have access to a robust collection of commercial digital services through the European Open Science Cloud. An initial portfolio of IaaS+ services is already available via the OCRE framework catalogue, making selected cloud-based services an integral component of EOSC. Moving forward, it will be important to evaluate the existing portfolio for any outstanding gaps in the provision of commercial services and datasets.

In light of the above, the project is launching a survey, targeting researchers from all disciplines, on the different commercial services and datasets they use in their projects and activities. The goal of the survey is to ensure that EOSC commercial services and datasets are not only accessible but also refined to meet the changing needs of Europe’s research communities.

Rapid, essential feedback

The survey questions are framed around 3 categories of commercial datasets and services:

• cloud-based digital services (e.g. compute, AI, developer tools, containers, analytics)
• commercial datasets
• development of new services involving research-focused SMEs.

The survey is estimated to take up to 10 minutes to complete.

Have a say in EOSC’s portfolio of commercial digital services

Based on survey feedback, it will be possible to determine whether these services are already available via EOSC, if they can be improved or, alternatively, could be added to the EOSC commercial services portfolio.

Looking ahead, this input can have implications for the strategic enhancement and uptake of services via EOSC.

Deadline

The survey will be open until 16 November 2021.

Complete the commercial services survey here: https://eosc-portal.eu/commerical-service-survey

CESSDA coordinates SSHOC to overcome domain specific silos and connect SSH user communities to EOSC.

The future EOSC is shaped along action lines that are detailed in close collaboration between the EOSC governance and the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). The ESFRI cluster projects - ENVRI-FAIR, EOSC-Life, ESCAPE, EOSC-Life, PaNOSC and SSHOC - were launched in 2019 in order to implement interfaces to integrate computer and data management solutions, to create cross-border and open cooperation spaces and to promote clouds via the EOSC portal for a larger user community. Through its cluster projects, ESFRI steers the integration and consolidation of thematic e-infrastructure platforms in preparation for connecting them to EOSC. The five cluster projects produced position papers (2020 and 2021 position papers) reflecting their views on and expectations of EOSC, as well as the ESFRI contributions to the European data infrastructure.

SSHOC provides the social sciences, humanities, and heritage science contribution to the EOSC by:

• Interconnecting existing and new infrastructures to build the SSH Cloud
• Maximising data reuse through Open Science and FAIR principles
• Providing training resources, a training network, and training activities
• Setting up an appropriate governance model

CESSDA’s coordination efforts in SSHOC have been highlighted by the EC reviewers as: “a very well organised and managed project … and created a strong brand in the first 18 months. The project is not only operationally, but also financially very well managed, showing efficiency and respecting the financial plan”. In a project now counting 200+ people and 50 institutions, that is a great milestone achieved.

In its efforts to overcome domain specific barriers and connecting user communities to the EOSC, CESSDA actively seeks to connect additional SSH Research Infrastructures to the Social Science and Humanities Open Cloud, such as EURHISFIRM, RESILIENCE and upcoming COORDINATE, and OPERAS.

Implementing the European Open Science Cloud in EOSC Future

The EOSC Future started in April 2021 and will deliver a durable and effective set of EOSC components, used by an increasing number of researchers and other users, in a co-creation process with the users of the EOSC community. It will bring together all major stakeholders in EOSC, from the e-Infrastructures, Science Clusters, and other international players. CESSDA, as coordinator of the SSH cluster, actively onboards SSHOC to EOSC Future.

Enabling researchers to discover and reuse SSH data in TRIPLE

The TRIPLE project is developing a full multilingual and multicultural solution for the appropriation of SSH resources. The GoTriple platform will provide a 360° discovery experience thanks to linked exploration provided by the Isidore search engine developed by CNRS and a coherent solution providing innovative tools to support research (visualisation, annotation, trust building system, crowdfunding, social network, and recommender system). In the project, new ways to conduct, connect and discover research are imagined; it is promoting cultural diversity inside Europe, supporting scientific, industrial, and societal applications of SSH science; and connecting researchers and projects with other stakeholders: citizens, policy makers, companies, enabling them to take part in research projects or to answer to some of their issues. CESSDA´s participants in the project are also its service providers - ADP (SI), UKDS (UK), FSD (FI).

Enhancing the EOSC portal and connecting thematic clouds in EOSC Enhance

EOSC Enhance project aims to enhance the service provider interface and to accelerate the deployment and uptake of EOSC services and resources in the EOSC catalogue. As one of the ESFRI Cluster representatives, CESSDA is involved in the further development of the EOSC catalogue, as well as in advising on functional specifications and testing API for interconnecting and harvesting thematic services. Participation in this project is an opportunity for reaching new users and for aligning SSHOC project instruments and resources with EOSC. CESSDA already successfully onboarded two of its tools, CESSDA DC ™ and DMEG ™, to the EOSC Portal:

• The CESSDA Data Catalogue contains the metadata of all data in the holdings of CESSDA’s service providers. It is a one-stop-shop for search and discovery, enabling effective access to European social science research data. Here we explain how European researchers benefit from the CESSDA DC ™ .
• The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is designed by European experts to help social science researchers make their research data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

Discover social scientific datasets you need for your research in the CESSDA DC ™.

Check the CESSDA DMEG ™ for your Data Management Plan.

Join the CESSDA Roadshow to learn more about how CESSDA contributes to research tackling global challenges, register here.

Image credits: Blomberg, Niklas, & Petzold, Andreas. (2020). ESFRI thematic cluster view on EOSC. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3631247

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Register for the CESSDA™ Roadshow on Migration for the Social Sciences on 08.10.2021, 14:00-15:30 CEST:

Register here.

CESSDA Data Catalogue™ - A trusted data repository

The CESSDA DC™ has over 3000 datasets on migration and minorities, searchable and documented in 14 European languages with rich metadata that facilitates cross-disciplinary research all from a single access point.

Dimitra Kondyli: Service Provider Viewpoints

The DC™ ensures that quality data is more accessible and usable by a wide range of users, academic, non-academic, policy makers, not just in Europe but all over the world. In this Roadshow, I will be highlighting datasets on migration and explaining how researchers can benefit from using and re-using them.

Ami Saji, SciencesPo and Dimitri Prandner, Johnnes Kepler University: Researcher Viewpoints

The CESSDA DC and EMM (Ethnic and Migrant Minority) Survey Registry are both free online services that offer detailed and structured information (i.e. metadata) about existing social sciences research. These services are particularly well-positioned to serve as access points to reliable and high quality research pertinent to addressing real world challenges.

During the CESSDA™ Roadshow on Migration, Ami Saji will illustrate how service providers and researchers are working together to make social sciences research, including those focused on migration, easier to find, access, and re-use. This event will also hopefully inspire new partnerships that will further efforts to untap the full potential of migration data. From there, Dimitri Prandner highlights the impacts of CESSDA and the EMM Registry in terms of valuable insights from a researcher perspective and how students can truly benefit from understanding what a good dataset is and how to discover data.

CESSDA™ Podcast on Migration and Mobility

This CESSDA™ podcast zooms in on how the CESSDA Data Catalogue (CESSDA DC™) is shaping research on migration and minorities with viewpoints from Dr Dimitra Kondyli, Research Director at the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE) in Greece and Ami Saji, junior researcher at the Centre of European and Comparative Politics at SciencePo in France.

Tune in here.

CESSDA DMEG™ User Story from the MiCreate Project

Peter Čerče, Data Officer in the EU-funded project on Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MiCreate), shares his experiences on using the CESSDA™ Data Management Expert Guide when defining a Data Management Plan that needs to deal with very sensitive information and diverse ethical challenges across multiple countries.

Read the user story here.

Perspectives on Migration from the HumMingBird Project

HumMingBird is another European project dealing with sensitive data, aimed at understanding changing migration flows and their drivers. Its 2021 policy brief sheds light on persistent migration data gaps that hinder effective policymaking, emphasising the importance of approaches that combine both quantitative and qualitative data. Gender gaps in migration are a major challenge, such as often overlooked needs and health of female migrants, leaving them without access to basic services.

Find out more here.

A news item by Trust-IT

Milestone 1: New data on COVID-19 in the CESSDA Data Catalogue

2020 marked a major milestone in the CESSDA multilingual social sciences thesaurus with the inclusion of ‘COVID’ and ‘contagious diseases’ and new entries in the CESSDA Data Catalogue, where researchers can find and reuse data from research in the social sciences and humanities from 13 service providers. Countries span Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

A key challenge is understanding each other’s metadata standards and capturing essential information that is usable across disciplines, including behavioural data for research available across the social sciences. The Data Catalogue contains metadata of surveys in the holdings of the service providers. All COVID-19-related metadata is harvested to the Data Catalogue as they become available. The CESSDA dedicated COVID-19 web page is a good place for researchers to kick-start their work.

Milestone 2: Podcast on multi-faceted approaches to COVID-19

Cross-disciplinary research is the focus of the CESSDA podcast with Prof. Sylvia Kritzinger, one of the principal investigators of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP). The podcast underscores the fundamental importance of tracking the multi-faceted societal and economic impacts of the coronavirus and the wider benefits of sharing data, including policy recommendations, raising awareness among citizens and enabling students to re-use the data for their own research.

The podcast shows the added value of repositories like the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the intersection between the social sciences and many other disciplines in tackling the grand challenges of our time. Find out more.

Milestone 3: Booklet: “CESSDA behavioural data for research tackling the global COVID-19 challenge”

Another milestone is the booklet on behavioural data related to COVID-19, with highlights from the European Social Science Data Archives, COVID-19 insights, the CESSDA Data Catalogue and much more. Created for the CESSDA virtual expo stand at the 2021 edition of the International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI 2021), the booklet brings together key insights from 2020-2021. Tracking the evolution of COVID-19 through the Data Catalogue enables comparative studies, can influence policy-making and build public trust. Most importantly, good data can save lives as a testimony to how the CESSDA milestones on COVID-19 are bringing real insights with high societal impacts. Access the booklet.

COVID-19 is one of the research challenges spotlighted in the upcoming CESSDA™ Roadshow Series starting on 30 September and running through October 2021.

Find out more here.

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ELSST is currently available in 14 languages (including the source language English), with translation of Preferred Terms 98-100% complete in each target language: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. Out of the 14 available languages, all have been updated, with the exception of Spanish, Danish and Czech.

Development work in this period has focused on the revision of the Environment hierarchy, and of terms related to sexuality and gender. The latter work is still in progress so the terms and structure in the thesaurus may undergo some further changes.

The following changes were made to the English source language version:

• 19 new concepts
• 4 deleted concepts
• 9 relabelled Preferred Terms
• 37 new Entry Terms
• 11 deleted Entry Terms
• 22 new or changed Definitions
• 7 new or changed Scope Notes
• 54 changes to the Broader/Narrower Concepts
• 58 changes to Related Concepts
• 32 new or changed History Notes.

For more information, see Release Notes for a summary of changes since the last release.

In addition to these changes, some housekeeping work was carried out. Note fields have been revised to make sure that thesaural elements within them comply with Skosmos terminology (for example, terms previously referred to as ‘Use For terms’ are now ‘Entry Terms’).

Definition Sources have also been revised. They are now only assigned to ELSST Definitions that match the language of the source from which they are drawn, and not to Definitions that have been translated in-house.

Software training and upgrade

In the last 12 months the ELSST team has been training translators to use VocBench, our new thesaurus management system. The ELSST Content Development and Technical teams have also worked closely with the system developers of both VocBench and Skosmos, the publishing platform, and implemented the latest versions of the software as they have become available. They are as follows: VocBench 3.9.1, and Skosmos 2.11.

Coming soon: further language version of ELSST

We are pleased to report that a Hungarian version of ELSST is currently being prepared by the Research Documentation Centre, Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, Hungary. A new release of ELSST is planned for early 2022 to include the new language version.

Background

ELSST is a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. It is owned and published by CESSDA. ELSST is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.

The thesaurus covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and, increasingly, environmental science.

Find out more on Zenodo.

The Roadshows place centre stage two CESSDA services that are essential support for research in the social sciences:

• The Data Catalogue (CESSDA DC™) and
• The Data Management Expert Guide (CESSDA DMEG™).

This first one zooms in on the COVID-19 pandemic and takes place on 30 September (14-16 CET).

It gives examples of datasets in the CESSDA Data Catalogue and a practical guide and demo on how to discover them. Researchers then take the floor to talk about their experiences in using datasets with an open Q&A.

Register now for the next roadshows!

• Roadshow #2: 08.10.21 (14-16 CET) – Migration
• Roadshow #3: 14.10.21 (14-16 CET) – Climate Change
• Roadshow #4: 21.10.21 (14-16 CET) – Cancer and Chronic Diseases
• Roadshow #5: 28.10.21 (14-16 CET) – Circular Economy

Follow us on @CESSDA_Data and LinkedIn!

It will create a virtual environment where researchers can find, share and process interoperable data sets, publications, code and other research outputs.

The EOSC environment will also include professional data, computing and storage services to facilitate scientific workflows. The project looks to create a so-called ‘system of systems’ that will support the entire lifecycle of research data: from sharing, managing and exploiting their own data to discovering, re-using and recombining the data sets of others.

Your inputs can help make sure that this cluster of products and services responds to changing real-life needs.

User Personas Survey

Please complete the survey by 30 September 2021.

This will give us a better idea of the challenges you are facing in your day-to-day work and how EOSC services could help.

The data collected with the survey will be used for the sole purpose of their analysis and stored according to the EOSC Portal privacy policy.

The survey takes around 15 minutes.

Complete the survey here.

EOSC Future User Group

You can also apply to the EOSC Future User Group until 15 September 2021.

EOSC Future is seeking researchers and actors from all scientific fields to closely support the co-design of EOSC.

Apply here.

Designed with practicality in mind, they will share advice and insights from both national service providers and researchers to help the community and newcomers navigate their way through datasets and manage their data plans in the best possible way, showing how data is being re-used and shared.

The Roadshow series takes place as follow so save these dates:

• Roadshow 1: CESSDA™ and COVID-19 on 30.09.2021.
• Roadshow 2: CESSDA™ and Migration on 07.10.2021.
• Roadshow 3: CESSDA™ and Climate Change on 14.10.2021.
• Roadshow 4: CESSDA™ and Cancer and Chronic Diseases on 21.10.2021.
• Roadshow 5: CESSDA™ and Recycling on 28.10.2021.

Registrations will open soon so follow CESSDA™ on this website and via social media on @CESSDA_Data and on LinkedIn.

A news item by Trust-IT

The bot harvests metadata from various sources so that it all becomes available in a one-stop shop, the CDC. Researchers can thus find datasets available for reuse all over Europe.

However, to make this possible, service providers have to format their metadata to meet the conditions set out by the CESSDA DDI profiles. This is not always easy, especially when service providers rely on externally developed tools to manage their collections.

One such tool is Dataverse, a web application for data ingest and dissemination developed by the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) of Harvard University. Dataverse is used by eight of CESSDA service providers and partners.

While the software enables some degree of metadata customisation, the XML output must be used as-is. That is no longer the case thanks to the SUPER DADA script developed by SODHA.

‘SUPER DADA’ stands for Script for Updating Electronic Records: From Dataverse to CESSDA.

Once run, the script edits Dataverse-produced metadata to make it compliant with the CESSDA CDC DDI 2.5 Profile 1.0.4. This means the CDC will return no constraint violations and all the information contained in the metadata will be properly distributed in the CDC’s own metadata fields.

The script is available on GitHub in a specific sub repository created by IQSS for CESSDA-related Dataverse developments.

The Belgian CESSDA service provider, SODHA (Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Archive) welcomes feedback and suggestions for improvement.

More information:

SUPER DADA script on GitHub

CESSDA DDI profiles

Dataverse installations around the world

This podcast focuses on cross-disciplinary research on the COVID-19 pandemic as the crisis evolves over time with the insights from Sylvia Kritzinger, Professor of Methods in the Social Sciences at the Department of Government of the University of Vienna.

As one of the principal investigators of the Austrian National Election Study (AUTNES) and the Austrian Corona Panel Project (ACPP), Prof. Kritzinger explains the fundamental importance of the work being done to track the multi-faceted societal and economic impacts of the coronavirus, underscoring the wider benefits of sharing data, such as making recommendations for policy stakeholders, increasing awareness among citizens and enabling students to re-use the data for their own research.

Overall, this demonstrates the added value of trusted repositories like CESSDA in the fascinating field of social sciences and its intersection with many other disciplines as we seek to tackle the grand challenges of our time.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify.

A news item by Trust-IT

Mercè led several software platforms and tools for research data sharing and analysis, applied to all research fields.

CESSDA asked Mercè Crosas to answer a few questions.

Read the full interview below or tune in on YouTube!

1. How are you coping with the COVID-19 crisis and how do you make sure that you get work done?

   For me part of the problem has been working too hard because, in the current situation, you can be reached by many more people than before and could be available for a meeting anytime. At least that seems to be what people tend to assume. With Zoom, there are no distances. If you don't control it, you end up working a lot and there are no weekends but a continuous flow of meetings.

   I think that happened to many of us at the start of the pandemic. Fortunately, at Harvard we had a lot of support and guidance. Efforts have been made to raise awareness about stress and the importance of a good work-life balance.

   Now I manage it very well by combining going for walks every day with meetings and sitting down at home to just focus on work. When you have a team or you are running projects, and as work becomes more remote, it is important to figure out what is the right hybrid way of working. I think that working half remote and half in person could be ideal for many people. In that case it is very important to have a very clear understanding of common goals for the projects, what everybody is doing, what we want to achieve and milestones that you can review. Quick zoom check-ins once in a while are fine but there is some work that is done better without meetings and on your own. Here I mean strategic work and review work, as well as reading and tasks where you need to think and analyse data or situations.

   Thanks to that balance we have been able to continue to do a lot of work throughout the last year and a half.

2. Before all this, what would a typical working day have looked like? How does it look now?

   It is easy to forget how it used to look. I used to go a lot to campus and to be in my office. It was a very friendly environment and most of the team was on the same floor, so it was easy to chat. I guess those are the things that you miss, right? Just being able to check in with someone without having to plan a meeting and having brainstorming sessions about things that you do spontaneously. There were a lot of meetings, sometimes walking from one part of campus to another to meet with different teams or groups and a lot more travelling to conferences.

   I am pretty fortunate right now living in a little house in the countryside and being able to go for walks. However, I do miss some of the travelling as it is really nice to meet people that you might work with and just have interesting conversations.

   However, the pandemic has helped me realise that I was away too much, and that I value spending time in nature. At Harvard, we have been thinking about how we will restart after the pandemic. We are not saying that we will go back to where we were before. I think that what everybody should think about is not how to go back but what have we learned and what could we do better. Is there a better way to provide a work-life balance? A way that could make work more enjoyable.

3. Can you highlight three main ways that your work has supported researchers over the last few months?

   I can think of several and some that are ongoing. In my role as research area management officer, I work with all schools and across all the departments and units at Harvard University and together with colleagues we have created a service catalogue of all the services that Harvard provides. These are mostly data and computing services but some also administrative infrastructure services which are useful to improve how you do your research.

   A lot of support for researchers, when you think of open science or data management or dissemination of research findings, the code and so on, all of those services can be very distributed within the university or research institution. This means that often you do not know exactly what is happening in other units. For this reason, doing an inventory of everything that exists and making it available via a common website so that it can be shared within a unified way was very helpful for researchers.

   This helps us to improve and better coordinate the services, bring together some of them and identify any gaps.

   As an example, thanks to electronic lab notebooks, researchers at Harvard can collect and manage in a better way all the data and information that they have connected to a research project. It can thus be integrated with other parts of the repositories and in the Harvard system.

   Another way that we have been helping researchers is in the Dataverse project, where we are constantly creating new releases that help researchers to continue sharing data. We hope to provide more user-friendly ways of sharing data and more features that make data management and supporting the FAIR data principles easier for researchers.

   We are working on a proposal to help researchers – this is not yet in place – to create a Harvard Data Commons, integrating the existing repositories, such as the database repository, the open access repository for publications and the preservation repositories from the Harvard libraries with research computing so we can support better workflows.

   Lastly, we are also working on data privacy and sensitive data. We are now starting an open-source project that is called OpenDP for differential privacy. There is transparency about how we do what we do, but it adds privacy protection. Differential privacy is a mathematical approach to preserving privacy by using algorithms. We are building a library of algorithms and methods to add some amount of noise to the statistical data set so that you can release that publicly. By adding sufficient noise, no individual within the data could be re-identified.

4. Your career began in research in astrophysics and then the design and implementation of software for astronomical observations. How did you get to where you are today?

   I am often asked a similar question and I usually point out that there are actually many data scientists that are physicists and astrophysicists. In astronomy and physics, a lot of the work that we do is first managing and analysing very large amounts of data and building a lot of the systems that are needed to do so. We do not usually have companies or products that do the analyses of the data that we work on. We must build the tools that are used in research within astronomy and physics.

   As a researcher in those fields, you learn a lot by doing this. I remember that there were a lot of opportunities to move over to the private sector and to start-ups working on software development. I did actually do that for a few years and learned more about software development and managed several projects, some on building software for education and others related to biotechnology. In every case it involved building systems that would help with data management and analysis, but very focused on a specific field. After a while, I missed the Harvard academic environment, and I went back and took on the role of setting up a data sharing platform which ended up being Dataverse.

   Building a repository for making data more accessible for research was a much more general approach than what I had done before.

   Looking back, it seems like it could have been planned but in life there are a lot of things that have just happened. Life gives you opportunities and there are personal situations that make you think ”okay now it's a good moment to make a change”.

5. As a European based at Harvard, do you support FC Barcelona or …? And any favourite player?

   It is very easy answer. I am from Barcelona so Barça always and I guess Messi because we all love him.

   For many years, I played soccer in Boston with a women's team. It was a very friendly team and we used to coach our children and at some point, we thought “why don't we learn more about it and play ourselves?”. We made a team and played in some tournaments in New England. I was playing just before the COVID19 crisis, but I haven't played since then unfortunately. I do plan to take it up again. It was wonderful to play in the women's team.

6. Dataverse is used more and more. What are its major features and major current developments (incl. DDI-CDI metadata standard)?

   The community around the Dataverse project has grown both in terms of developers and users. Many of the new features, come not only from the institute for quantitative social science at Harvard – where it was first developed and it continues being developed, but also from groups all over the world. Many of these groups are in Europe.

   Some examples of main new features are multiple licenses and providing a workflow for depositing data and publishing it with a DOI, a persistent identifier. Data citation gives credit to the developers etc. Dataverse collects data sets and their metadata and files and recently we have been adding support features for different ways of depositing very large amounts of files.

   It supports any type of file, so we think of the platform as a generalised data repository. At the beginning, it aimed to support data in the social sciences and therefore benefits from a very strong support from DDI. We try to export all the standards that are useful to the community (e.g. Dublin core, DDI, etc.). One of the things that I think distinguishes it from other repositories is also the extensive variable metadata for tabular data files that the DDI supports very well.

   All the detailed elements such as variable labels, names and types help when it comes to exploring the data, analysing it or standardising it. Hopefully, in the future it will be possible to merge one data file with another. That is where DD-CDI comes in and Dataverse is very well placed to support that.

   We have been identifying a few use cases that could be useful together with Simon Hodson from CODATA and Steve McEachern from the Australian Data Archive, and Arofan Gregory from the Open Data Foundation and Joachim Wackerow from GESIS.

7. Who are your main users and are there differences between US and European users?

   The Harvard repository is open to any researcher from any discipline. So, we have individual researchers of course as users as well as journals that use the repository to deposit all the data from their publications. The repository is open to the whole research community, not limited to Harvard University.

   For the Dataverse software platform, which is an open-source platform, the users are from research institutions, organisations, or universities all over the world. Either they want to set up their own institutional repository or one to serve several universities. In Norway for example, several universities are working towards using a database using the same instance of the Dataverse software, where each one has its own collection. In Texas there is a consortium of universities that all use the same installation and also in Canada. The Australian Data Archive would be another example.

   I do not think there is necessarily a huge difference between European and American users. I get the impression that Europe is further ahead and more proactive in supporting open science (e.g. EOSC). CESSDA plays a vital role here, together with many other European organisations. Europe is ready to provide solutions for sharing data, whereas in the US, some universities are making good progress, but the trend is not generalised.

8. What are the main barriers for the reuse of research data and code and the key to improving research data management?

   There are several and we keep finding new ones! From the perspective of the researcher, you need to prepare your data in a way that somebody else besides you and your group can use it. You need to provide the proper descriptions and the metadata needs to be organised and cleaned -up, using formats that are easy to reuse.

   I think that the main issue is when the description of the data is missing – for example, a table of values on its own means nothing. When you start describing every column, variable or attribute that was collected and how it compares to others, then you can start to understand better the data set. The more standardised the data set is, the easier it is to use. I think that that is one of the problems and that's one of the areas where data curators and research data management professionals can help researchers. They should be working on data management from the beginning, instead of doing it at the end of their project when it is time to publish the data. At that point, you do not necessarily have all the information.

   Even if you don't do it to for somebody else to reuse it, we often say that if you go back to it after five years, you should be able to understand how that data set was collected and so on.

   Another important area is data protection. In the social sciences but also in medicine and public health, there is sensitive data or data from industry which is difficult to share for research purposes. You need proper data use agreements to be able to use data more easily. You also need the infrastructure, the technology and all the tools to be able to analyse personal data. Solutions are being developed in this area.

   Those are the main two barriers, I think.

   The key to improving research data management is education and cultural change. We need to raise awareness around the fact that research data management starts at the beginning of your research project. Another key aspect is providing the right infrastructure and tools to researchers. There is not one key, but rather bringing all researchers and data scientists and professionals closer together from the beginning to ensure better quality data.

9. Harvard University has a reference guide on research data management. Are you familiar with the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG). Is there room for collaboration?

   There is always room for collaboration! I am not very familiar with it, but I would love to learn more about it. Especially training materials could be shared. It would be interesting for us to see how we could work together.
   We have data management working group with data researchers and managers from across all the schools at Harvard. Maybe CESSDA could join us in a future working group meeting.

10. What are you most looking forward to achieving in 2021?

    I have a number of projects but since you're asking me to choose one thing. I think that just moving a few steps forward towards open science and data sharing, first starting at Harvard, would help to provide higher quality research.

    At the end of the day, I think that it is important that all the research that we do has a good application, that it improves society and the world we live in.

    Science can improve our knowledge of the world around us. A combination of people trusting more in science and establishing a better dialogue between researchers, scientists and societies would be wonderful.

    On a personal note, something I started some time ago is writing a play – or maybe it will end up being a Netflix series, you know – about the cosmic microwave background, combined with a human love story. I have an idea of a plot and I have interviewed several cosmologies to find out more about how the cosmic microbial background was discovered.

    I used to have an office just next to one of the Nobel prize winners (Robert Woodrow Woodson) so that inspired me!

    It is very low temperature radiation that appeared after the Big Bang and that has been expanding while the universe is expanding. I find it very romantic. As you mentioned, one of the hoped-for achievements is finding more time to write and for more personal goals. Maybe we aim too high with trying to change the world, but maybe we can change some small things!

More information:

Mercè Crosas is on Twitter!
About Mercè Crosas (her Harvard.edu website)
Generalitat de Catalunya (Institutional Government of Catalonia)
OpenDP, Developing Open Source Tools for Differential Privacy
The Dataverse project
Harvard Dataverse Repository
Document, Discover and Interoperate
Robert Woodrow Wilson, American radio astronomer who shared who jointly won the 1978 Nobel Prize for Physics for a discovery that supported the big-bang model of creation (Britannica).

See the previous article in this series: CESSDA asks ten questions to Jan Dalsten Sørensen.

Read the full interview below or tune in on YouTube!

1. How are you coping with the COVID-19 crisis and how do you make sure that you get work done?

   As for many people, I am now used to working from home. I do not really think much about how to get things done because for me it has become just business as usual. My days are in many ways the same as they were when we could actually go to work. Some colleagues have started coming in now to work physically and if we have a Skype meeting they say “okay, I'm at work today” and I think “I’m at work too, I'm just working from home!”.

   With all the modern technology that we have, our computers, Skype, Zoom, emails, and we have our phones, so it is fully possible to have a normal workday. I work the same hours as I would have if I were in the office. I work from say 8 CET to 16-17 CET and I do not work outside of that if I can help it.

   Even though I am working from home, I do not want to mix up work and my private life. I get up in the morning and get a blue shirt on and I can wear my t-shirts when I am not at work.

2. Before all this, what would a typical working day have looked like? How does it look now?

   As head of department, my days always consist of a lot of meetings. I know a lot of people are critical about meetings, but they are in many ways necessary. You have to talk to people in your department and from other departments. Now our meetings are on Skype or Zoom and I have to brew my coffee myself.

   There are a lot of meetings, emails, and phone calls. They are all necessary for the day-to-day business in your department to run smoothly.

   Of course, I need to set aside time to write briefs. At the national archives in Denmark, and I guess many other similar institutions, we like to write, and we have a culture of writing a lot, so I write a lot! For instance, our plans at the level of the department for next year or our views on a certain topic.

   I therefore must make sure that I have time for the day-to-day business and set aside time for writing and planning ahead. Otherwise, it is suddenly 2022 and what plans do we have?

   I also communicate a lot also with people from the outside world, outside of the archives. I am interested in how the national archives can help them and to develop solutions together with them.

   That is what my days looked like before and that is what my days look like now. The main difference between then and now is that I have lost all the informal communication with my colleagues.

   Usually, you would see people over lunch or hang out by the coffee machine or people would just pop by your office. After over a year where we have mostly been working from home, I think it is starting to get critical. We can continue with our new routines, but at some point, you also need to develop new ideas or get something new started. That is really hard when you do not have these informal meetings with your colleagues anymore. We have tried casual Zoom calls, but it has not really worked that well.

3. Can you highlight three main ways that your work has supported researchers over the last few months?

   One of the things that we do a lot at my department is handing out data to be used in a range of research projects. A main part of our work is to make sure that researchers that need data that have been submitted to us can get access to them. Either they can download them, or we can give them, specifically our data. That has certainly been very important not only in the last few months but for a very long time. It is the reason why we exist, and we also have researchers from other countries that use our collections.

   A new project is a website called “Folk i Fortiden”, i.e. Danish for “people in the past”. It offers a map of Denmark where you can pinpoint say a parish that you are interested in and then you can get information about the population in that particular area, based on transcribed data from censuses or parish registers. For instance, you may want to find out what was the distribution between men and women in the parish that your great-great-great-great-grandfather lived in in 1850, or what the age distribution was, etc.

   We have taken the data that we have and transcribed them and then presented them in a new way. You can also download these data from the website. This is appealing for genealogists, but we certainly also hope that a lot of other researchers will be able to see the potential of accessing this kind of data.

   Later this year we will also launch a new platform that will exhibit metadata about both governmental and research data on the same platform. At the national archives, we have collected a great deal of digital data over the years and metadata. However, they have not been exhibited in a good enough way. One of the best things about this this platform is that it will show our entire collection of digital data whether it is research data or governmental data. You will be able to see the entire collection presented on the same platform. This will hopefully make it easier for researchers to find both types of data.

   For example, if a researcher has been working with research data, they may now be more inclined to wonder whether there is something in the governmental digital records that they could use for their research.

4. You studied history and Latin and started your career in a public museum before starting at the National Data Archive as an archivist. How did you get to where you are today? And do you still read Latin?

   When I was in in graduate school, I was an intern at a public museum, and I was hoping for a job at a museum because I really liked that that type of work. When I had graduated, I needed a job so I applied to any job that I felt I could do. There was an open position at the national archives for an IT archivist and I got the job. At the time, I did not know much about archives but fortunately it turned out to be very interesting.

   I was hired to do an appraisal of governmental data and I came in with a history background so I could help define what type of information should be kept for posterity. As a historian, I was very aware that we, as a society, needed to make sure that we document today's society for future research, so that was what I did for the first couple of years. I made appraisal decisions on IT systems to make sure that government agencies organise their digital information in a way that meant that it could potentially be submitted to the national archives. It can be very difficult and expensive if archiving has not been considered early on and the national archives come and say, “hey we need a copy of your data” and you are wondering “how do we handle this?”. If you start working with that at an early stage, it is much easier for you as an agency to do that.

   I also worked with the documentation that agencies needed to transfer with the data. After a couple of years, I became head of that section and then in an organisational change in 2007, I became head of digital preservation so that's when history took more of a background role. I was head of that department until April this year, when I moved to the department that we call communication of archival data.

   Our purpose is to make our data accessible. We must ask ourselves “how can we make our data useful for people?”. I feel that it has been a privilege to have started working on the ingest side and then move on to preservation and now data access. This is now my twenty third year at the national archives and I would have never thought that I would stay so long. It just continues to be a great place to work!

   To answer the other part of your question, I do not really read Latin anymore. I had a go during the winter because there was nothing we could do, due to lockdown. You could not go out, you could not invite people over, so I started reading from Ceasar's Gallic Wars (“Commentarii de Bello Gallico”) but I did not get that far. Then spring was here, and I could start doing something outside instead. The potential is there for me to pick it up again at some point.

5. a) Can you tell us about some exciting upcoming data projects from DNA?
   b) You are also Chair of the DLM Forum. Can you tell us more about your work there?

   I can answer both in one as it is true that I have been the chair of the DLM Forum since 2017, and in the board or the executive committee since 2015. I recently decided that it was time for me to step aside and let somebody else take over. Just last week we had the annual general meeting, so that is a closed chapter, although I have truly cherished the chance to do some international cooperation and networking with colleagues in other countries¹.

   In terms of current and upcoming projects at the Danish National Archives (DNA), first of all, we are in the process of defining a new standard for how you submit data to the national archives.

   We are working on implementing a new European standard for database preservation and the package structure that you use when you submit data. We have played an active role in the project that has developed those new standards, so now we need to implement them in our own legislation. That way we can make sure that DNA becomes part of a larger community for the preservation of digital information. From my new perspective as head of the communication of archival data this is very interesting, as it allows us to design new access solutions together with other European countries rather than on our own.

   In a few years’ time, we will be able to give access to our data using tools and methods that we have developed together with other institutions, which I think is really promising. This time around we have really taken the user perspective when defining the requirements that we set up for the submission of data.

   Naturally, we have always thought about what sort of documentation is needed for making data available. However, now that we have a lot more user experience than we had a decade ago when defining the last piece of legislation, we can say much more easily that “when you submit data to the archive, you need to do this and that, you need to document like this you need to describe it like this…”. That will make it easier for our users to use the archived data.

   We have several other projects in the pipeline that will take our digitised paper records and create new data sets out of them using OCR (optical character recognition) or HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition). A lot of our records are for example protocols where you have columns with numbers, and we are experimenting with digitising those protocols and converting these numbers to a data set that can be used by a researcher. That is something that we will do a lot more of in the coming years. It opens a data collection up in a completely new way for researchers. Not everyone is willing to go page by page through a paper book.

6. Just last year you completed a Master of Public Governance at Copenhagen Business School. What do you intend to do with this?

   Back in the old days, if you were the head of a department or something you would usually be the smartest specialist and the reason you were chosen to head a department would be that you were the one who knew most about the particular area of work.

   But that is not the way things work anymore. Today, you have to do a lot more as head of a department or a manager that does not necessarily have as much to do with the specialised tasks that you do in your department. You have to be able to manage change, to make sure that the organisation works, and that people feel well at work.

   There are so many other things that you need to learn to be a manager. I would therefore say that the Master of Public Governance is an education that should help you to be a good manager in the public domain. We have a lot of requirements for what it's like to be a public manager so what I will do with it is to hopefully improve and continue to improve as a manager!

   I want to manage the specialists who know their subject much more than I do. I hope that this education will help me be a better manager!

7. As former Divisional Head of Digital Preservation, what do you take-away from that experience? Is Denmark on track in its handling of digital records?

   I would say that Denmark is on track. We have set up a system where all state agencies have to notify the national archives on their IT systems and then the national archives make the appraisal decision and make sure the data is submitted before they become obsolete.

   We have a relatively good procedure for the actual preservation of data and we also have a structure in place for making data accessible. Overall, I would say that we are on track but what I have learned from being a head of digital preservation is that it is often complicated when it comes to IT. There is always something that you have not thought about and there is always something that requires a specialist that you have not got either.

   We should certainly make sure that we always have the right resources to continue to carry out this work. It’s not the type of work where you can ever say that you are finished. Technology is always developing and what the agencies use for instance when they produce data or the technology that is used in research institutions to produce research data will just continue to give us new challenges that we have to uh to deal with.

   One important lesson is that this work is never done, and you have to make sure that you keep up with technology. You cannot just make the world stop going around because you need time to think about how to handle the complexity.

8. How do government data and research data supplement each other? What do today’s research data users need?

   It has been very important for us in the past couple of years to make sure that we do not divide too much between governmental data and research data. From a research perspective, if you want to do research in a particular area, you should be aware of both the research data that we have in that area but also the fact that a lot of government institutions might have similarly relevant data.

   Our aim is for them to look at our collection as a whole and find information they can use from both governmental records and the research data that we have at the archive. These are two important components that you should look at together. Of course, some of the research data that we have, such as survey data, have some characteristics that you might not find in governmental data. We should also keep in mind and respect that they have been created under different conditions and they might also be used in different contexts.

   I think that today’s researchers need a good mix of data. They need to be able to easily understand and access the data that we have. During the exploration phase of their research project, they will be looking at what type of information we have at DNA to see if it could come in handy for their project. It is therefore crucial to have good and solid metadata. Data must be documented in a way that allows them to be made sense of and reused. That is probably the most important thing!

   Maybe researchers also need inspiration! I have often thought that it would be a good idea for us at the archives to have some showcases of how data have been used so that they can get inspiration to research projects that they can use or do based on our data.

9. One of CESSDA’s core products is our Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG). What are the main barriers for the reuse of research data and code and how can we tackle them?
   

   One barrier could be the lack of technical knowledge. By this I do not mean that researchers do not have technical knowledge, but if you want to broaden the group of people working with your data, then you may need to consider how to make sure that they have the necessary technical skills to work with this particular type of source material.

   Imagine that you are a historian and that you are used to working with mainly documents. Then we, as the national archives, need to look into how we can make it easier for you to work with a statistical data set or a database.

   Although I would not necessarily call the European Data Protection Regulation, GDPR, a barrier, I do think that many researchers have experienced working with personal data under secure circumstances as a difficult if not daunting task. For that reason, anonymisation of data sets is crucial, in other words taking out the personally identifiable information out, so that you, as a researcher, can work with them. This is definitely something that you need to think about and that might make your life a little bit more complicated.

10. What are you most looking forward to achieving in 2021?

    Our department on communication of archival data is a relatively new department. It was created in January 2020, only a few months before the COVID-19 pandemic closed everything down. This means that we have not had much chance to meet in person, as a team. My main goal for 2021 is therefore to make sure that when we begin 2022, we have a clear direction for our future work.

    On a personal note, I would love to have some more flowers on my balcony, as they have a tendency to die!

11. What do you typically do after work on a nice day in Copenhagen like today?

    As I live in the city, I feel that I have to take advantage of the fact that I live very close to the beach and can get some fresh air very easily. I am on the island where the airport is, south of the city centre.

    I swim all year round. Well, “swim” is too much to say because in January or February, I just go for a quick dip! Now it is warm enough to actually swim so that is something I really love to do. I also like to go for a run along the beach.

     

¹ Jan Dalsten stepped down as Chair of the DLM Forum at the General Assembly meeting in May 2021.

More information:

Jan Dalsten Sørensen is on Twitter!
Communication of Archival Data. Danish National Archives (sa.dk): Communication of Archival Data exhibits the Danish National Archives’ data in new ways so that both existing and new users are aware of and use unexploited opportunities in the Danish National Archives’ data.
Link-Lives – A Research Project: We reconstruct life-courses and multigenerational family relations for (nearly) all Danes, from 1787–1968
Use survey data from our collection - the Danish National Archives (sa.dk)

See the previous article in this series: CESSDA asks ten questions to Sébastien Oliveau.

It is committed to ensuring that data sets remain usable and interpretable over the long term, even as technology or the needs of the research community change.

The scientific foundation for this is the field around research data management that the department is further professionalising. This flows into easier and user-friendly access to research data and into sustainable and target group-oriented services.

The data services are now available in a new, clearer web offering.

They include advice, training and service packages on all legal, technical and organisational aspects of research data management (FDM) - from design to post-use.

• Get advice and training in all areas of research data management (virtually or on-site) and tailored to your needs.
• Our new "How to Guide" informs you about the procedure for publishing your data via GESIS.
• Our proven data service packages Archiving BASIS, PLUS or PREMIUM help you share your data.

But it's not just your data, a large collection of more than 6,500 individual data sets are user-friendly and securely accessible for re-analysis. Sensitive data can be analysed via the Secure Data Center.

The da|ra data registration agency supports easy retrieval, re-analysis, and citation of your data by assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOI).

Find out more on the homepage of the DSS department.

The purpose of the job is to assist the Senior Communication Officer in a broad range of communication tasks: social media, website maintenance & content, visuals, newsletter, project promotion, etc.

Find out more about the internship:

Expected start

Autumn 2021

The CESSDA consortium is committed to supporting researchers working on COVID-19 related research and its significant health and societal impacts.

Discover:

• 2020 Insights - tracking the evolution of COVID-19 and what it means for the CESSDA Data Catalogue
  • Looking at comparatively similar situations from the past
  • Public trust influences COVID-19 measures taken by authorities
  • The Austrian Corona Panel Project
• 2021 Insights - tracking the evolution of COVID-19 and what it means for the CESSDA Catalogue
  • Good data can save lives
  • World Pandemic Research Network
• COVID-19 in the CESSDA Data Catalogue
• A deep dive into CESSDA COVID-19 resources! Highlights from our European Social Science Data Archives

Download the booklet here and visit our COVID-19 webpage!

About ICRI:

The International Conference on Research Infrastructures typically occurs every two years. The conference engages policy experts, facility managers, leading researchers and a variety of other stakeholders to discuss challenges and emerging trends for research infrastructures around the world.

Visit ICRI2021 here.

The user story, across disciplines

Duncan's research project aimed to challenge the existing historiographical narrative on the relation between ordinary citizens and the Salazarist political police (PIDE).

We asked him how the DMEG had helped him design his Data Management Plan.

The benefits and impact of using the CESSDA DMEG were manifold and far-reaching. In collaboration with ICS’s own Data Protection Officer, I was able to design a solid and secure DMP that was subsequently approved by the authorities of the Marie Curie Fellowship actions.

More information:

Duncan's full story:

Adapt your own Data Management Plan on Data Protection. You can download the full DMEG for your personal study offline (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3820473).

CESSDA held a webinar on "CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide: Why and how to use it?". You can find the recording on YouTube & the slides on Zenodo.

Read the previous user story: CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide User Story - Peter Čerče. Data Officer, Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MICREATE) project, Peter tells his story on using the guide for ethical challenges with interview data.

The new bodies are within the remit of the Ministry of Education and Research.

NSD’s services to remain within the new bodies

NSD has awaited the government’s decision regarding its future organisation for several years, which takes place within a wider structural change within research and higher education in Norway.

The overall goal is to remove overlapping services and responsibilities in the current set-up and to ensure better and more efficient services for users in research and higher education.

Core tasks to be transferred to the new service delivery body

NSD’s core tasks and responsibilities related to research data management will be transferred to the new service delivery body.

This includes our GDPR-related services as a national resource and competence centre for data protection issues, and our international responsibilities, including the services that support the European Social Survey (ESS).

The new service delivery body will contribute to international and national strategies and goals, such as the FAIR data goals for research data and offering digitised services for research.

In addition to NSD, the service delivery body will consist of:

• Services from the Directorate for ICT and joint services in higher education and research
• Uninett – the ICT infrastructure company for Norwegian research and education.

The new service delivery body will be operational as of 1 January 2022, as an administrative body directly under the Ministry of Education and Research. The name is yet to be decided.

ERIH PLUS and statistical services for higher education and research to the new directorate

NSDs statistical services for higher education and research (DBH) and services indexing academic journals, such as ERIH PLUS, will become part of the new directorate for higher education and skills.

The directorate will be established on 1 July 2021.

The new directorate will maintain responsibilities for internationalisation and quality in education, and work to strengthen life-long learning.

In addition to the NSD services, the new directorate will consist of

• Diku – the Norwegian Agency for International Cooperation and Quality Enhancement in Higher Education
• Skills Norway
• Several tasks from the Directorate for ICT and joint services in higher education and research,
• Some tasks from NOKUT – the Norwegian Agency for Quality Assurance in Education
• Universell – National Coordinator of Accessibility of Higher Education in Norway

A good framework for NSD’s services

“The structural change provides a good framework for collaborating more closely at a national level to fulfil NSD’s basic purpose, which is to promote and provide easy access to high quality data and provide services to research and higher education,” says Kvalheim.

The reorganisation of NSD’s services was expected, as it is part of a wider structural change within research and higher education in Norway.

Vigdis Kvalheim: “It is somewhat special that this decision coincides with NSD’s 50^th anniversary. However, the name or organisational structure as such are not crucial elements here; the framework conditions for delivering high quality services are. I believe this change will provide a good basis for strengthening the infrastructure services relating to research data and data protection that the research community has built together with NSD over the last 50 years.”

“As one of the founding Service Providers of CESSDA, NSD has played an important role within CESSDA. NSD’s expertise in data management and data protection continues to be of value to researchers both in Norway and abroad, and we are grateful for their support in both CESSDA’s internal and European projects,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

SND is the Swedish service provider for CESSDA and takes part in many of the consortium's activities. Together with a network of around 40 universities and public research institutes, the Swedish National Data Service (SND) forms a national infrastructure for open access to research data from all scientific disciplines.

SND develops tools and services that facilitate the management, sharing, and reuse of research data. At SND, metadata and research data can be described and made accessible (with the help of a data description form) and published in the SND research data catalogue. Published data can be reused globally for secondary analyses, new research, feasibility studies, reviews of research results, and for educational purposes.

A big part of what SND does is to provide training and information. The SND website offers digital training materials for researchers as well as staff in research data support functions.

The web pages on data management contain a wealth of information that can be of assistance during the entire research process. SND also provides guides for data management plans, persistent file formats, and best practices for managing different types of data.

Researchers can contact any of the Research Data Advisors or Domain Specialists if they have questions about managing research data. SND also hosts various events connected to research data and data management

• When did your country become a member?

Sweden became a member of the “Old CESSDA” in 1980 (an informal umbrella organisation), then of CESSDA AS in 2013, and of CESSDA ERIC in 2017.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

SND staff have knowledge and experience in many areas related to research data and research data management. SND is currently involved in work related to the certification of data repositories, a data archiving guide, the creation of a common technological platform, and in supporting aspiring and/or new CESSDA members.

SND is responsible for the Swedish language translations of the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) and the common controlled vocabularies in the CESSDA Vocabulary Service.

SND will also play a crucial role in the further development of the European Question Bank. Previous involvement has been in, for instance, persistent identifiers and the development of a common metadata profile for CESSDA.

As a national service provider, SND also takes part in larger projects. SND is a member of the SSHOC (Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud) cluster project and the EOSC Association (European Open Science Cloud). Some examples of previous projects are CESSDA SaW, SERSCIDA, DASISH, DwB, and CESSDA PPP (see past projects here).

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

The Swedish membership in CESSDA provides Swedish researchers and students with a number of benefits: access to well-documented and high-quality European research data, expert knowledge on data preservation and access, and training resources in several fields.

Moreover, the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the vocabulary service allow Swedish researchers to make their data visible and reusable internationally.

Being a national service provider gives SND the opportunity to influence the development of CESSDA and its tools and services. Being part of the CESSDA community also gives SND staff the opportunity to share expertise and technology with colleagues from all over Europe. This helps SND to maintain competence, stay up to date with important developments in the field of research data, and deliver high-quality data services to national and international users.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

The tools and services of most interest to SND and our users are the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG), the CESSDA Data Catalogue, the ELSST Multilingual Thesaurus, and the CESSDA Vocabulary Service.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA DMEG is comprehensive and gives a very good introduction to systematic research data management during different stages of a research project. This is a necessary basis for making research data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).

The guide covers close to all data management aspects in the research process for both qualitative and quantitative data, taking technical as well as legal issues into account.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

CESSDA metadata requirements and technical solutions help us make our data FAIR compliant. Mandatory fields in the CESSDA Metadata Model make us aware of information needed to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

Thanks to the common controlled vocabularies and the ELSST Multilingual Thesaurus, data from different CESSDA Service Providers are described in a similar way and with concepts that are understandable for our designated community.

Discussions within CESSDA on how to interpret and work for 'FAIRness' is also very helpful when developing the national service.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We find the range of CESSDA Training services to be very useful for researchers and students at Swedish universities, and also for research data professionals in the Swedish university network. Thanks to a variety of training activities organised by CESSDA, SND users get access to European expertise that would be hard to find elsewhere.

We recommend training activities on different CESSDA tools and services (DMEG, CESSDA Data Catalogue, etc.), as well as training on how to find data within different areas or data types. CESSDA webinars and tutorials are pedagogically structured and provide a good introduction to the different tools and services.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2021?

Overall, being a part of the CESSDA community helps SND to continue promoting the sharing of, and trustworthy access to, research data. CESSDA also facilitates global visibility for research data produced in Sweden.

The continuous development of CESSDA tools and services is useful for SND staff and users, e.g. researchers and research data professionals in the SND network.

The cooperation with CESSDA and the national service providers will also be important for SND as a new member in the EOSC Association via the University of Gothenburg.

More information:

Contact SND.

SND network meeting at University of Gävle, 2019

Photo credits: SND.

Read the last article in this series about DATICE – The Icelandic Social Science Data Service.

The Icelandic Social Science Data Service (DATICE) was formally established in late 2018 and is located in Reykjavík, within the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI) at the University of Iceland. We are the official CESSDA service provider in Iceland.

So far, our main role in CESSDA has been to advocate responsible and FAIR use of research data in Iceland, and to promote CESSDA’s activities and resources. We also contribute by working on expanding our data collection and making it accessible to researchers across Europe.

• When did your country become a member?

Iceland joined CESSDA in 2018, first as a partner through CESSDA Widening activities and then as an official member on 17 June 2019, which coincidentally is Iceland's national day.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

DATICE has been in a start-up phase for the past couple of years, so our contribution to CESSDA has so far been modest. Our focus has mainly been on developing essential parts of DATICE’s services and technical infrastructure.

At the end of last year, we reached an important milestone as we launched a Dataverse repository which will replace our Nesstar system.

This year, we aim to develop our service further by adding some valuable features to our Dataverse system, including tabular data exploration. We look forward to sharing our experience and know-how in this area with other service providers.

We are also working on the Icelandic translation of the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) and we will soon start work to make our data accessible via the CESSDA Data Catalogue.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

DATICE has benefitted in numerous ways from first a partnership with CESSDA and then membership. For example, we have received support and advice from fellow service providers, particularly from the AUSSDA office in Vienna, as well as GESIS in Germany, which we are very grateful for.

DATICE has also benefited from the various resources made available by CESSDA and its network of service providers across Europe (e.g. the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, training activities, etc.), which we have found to be invaluable tools during the developmental phase of our services.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

The European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) is very relevant to us, as well as the CESSDA Data Catalogue. Both of these tools will help us to promote Icelandic research data and make sure that it is findable for researchers abroad.

We plan to make use of the thesaurus when indexing data within our Dataverse system and to contribute to future revisions of ELSST. These tools are also of great interest to researchers in our country.

The CESSDA catalogue is a valuable resource for social scientists and gives access to an incredible wealth of data; and ELSST provides researchers with a way to look up essential words and concepts in a number of languages.

The European Question Bank is also an interesting project and would harmonise well with the work of colleagues at our host institute, SSRI, who have been developing a searchable question bank in Icelandic.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG) is designed by European experts to help social science researchers make their research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The FAIR data principles are at the heart of this project.

The guide has a specific section on FAIR data to help researchers prepare the research data for optimal (re-)use, with a video and an expert tip.

It has seven chapters and is regularly updated. We find it extremely useful when explaining essential data management strategies to researchers and students.

The DMEG is well structured and easily accessible, we plan to make full use of it in the services that we offer, for example, when assisting researchers in setting up a Data Management Plan for their research, and as part of our training and teaching.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

We believe the implementation and dissemination of the FAIR data principles hinge on strong cooperation between those who have a thorough understanding of data management.

Monitoring closely CESSDA’s activities and projects, as well as the latest developments in the field, means that we are in a good position to work towards making our data compliant with the FAIR data principles.

Our aim is thus to serve as a national example for improvements in the area of responsible use and conservation of data.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We regularly recommend the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide to our colleagues, researchers and students who wish to enhance their skills in data management. The guide has also served as a very good resource when explaining the essentials of proper data management and assisting researchers in setting up a Data Management Plan.

We also monitor closely all activities of CESSDA and its many service providers, so that we can recommend the most relevant ones to researchers and students within our university, as well as other actors who have an interest in FAIR data management.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2021?

We hope to see CESSDA continue their important work of providing a shared platform for social science data archives in Europe and fostering collaborations between them. It was a turning point for DATICE to have been appointed as an official CESSDA service provider in 2019.

A major goal for us now is to demonstrate the advantages and benefits of having a national data archive such as DATICE, as well as the impact of our services, and of course to secure sustainable funding.

This is a shared priority for all data services across Europe. It is therefore helpful for us to be able to seek advice, support and feedback from CESSDA and its service providers, and benefit from their years of experience.

Read the last article in this series about NSD – Norwegian Centre for Research Data.

For more than 20 years, Belgium had no dedicated repository for the preservation and dissemination of social science research data. The Belgian Archives for Social Sciences (BASS), hosted at the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), closed in 1998 due to a lack of funding. Now, thanks to the joint efforts of the State Archives, UCLouvain, and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgian researchers in social sciences and digital humanities can safely store their data and access reusable datasets.

SODHA provides researchers with a robust infrastructure that helps them manage their data. Belgium produces high quality research in the social sciences, and in the age of open science, highlighting scientific accomplishments involves opening access to data collections. To this end, SODHA not only offers a user-friendly online platform, it also safekeeps the interests of all parties involved — researchers, depositors, students, research centres, universities, funding agencies — thanks to a well-defined legal framework.

SODHA focusses on the needs of its users. In 2018 a nation-wide survey was conducted among all research centres in social sciences in Belgian universities. Thanks to a high response rate, there is now a clear overview of the needs and practices of social scientists in terms of research data management. The State Archives are currently working on broadening the scope of SODHA to include digital humanities and potentially other research disciplines in the future.

“Scientific data are invaluable research materials for scientists and historians alike. Archivists are information specialists who cater to the needs of different target audiences,” stated Karel Velle, Director of the State Archives. “Our expertise in digital object management makes the State Archives the perfect institution for hosting a service such as SODHA!”

“We are delighted to welcome SODHA as a new data service provider of CESSDA and look forward to working closely together in our various projects towards achieving FAIR and open data,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

CESSDA asked Sébastien Oliveau to answer a few questions.

1. How are you coping with the COVID-19 crisis and how do you make sure that you get work done?

   The entire PROGEDO organisation has been teleworking since March 2020. The teams have been very reactive to organise themselves and to protect themselves from the virus.

   Nevertheless, we had to reorganise ourselves quickly: buy the necessary equipment to work remotely and set up the necessary computer security conditions for working from home.

   In the end, I think we succeeded. I am very proud of everyone. Everyone made it possible for the work to continue and the service to the research communities was uninterrupted. However, it is not always easy to work from home.

2. Before all this, what would a typical working day have looked like? How does it look now?

   There is no "typical working day", and this is one of the things I like about this mission of managing PROGEDO.

   PROGEDO is active on multiple fronts: at the European level, it represents France in the ERIC CESSDA, and coordinates quantitative data policy in the social sciences and humanities (SSH) for the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. At the national level, we support access to data through a dissemination portal that brings together several actors (PROGEDO, INED, Sciences Po) and we also support structuring projects in terms of data collection: we finance large surveys (ERIC SHARE, ERIC ESS, but also the GGP survey, EVS, ISSP, etc.), we also support initiatives to capitalise on existing data (economic data from the EURHISFIRM project for example, or the Ethmig Survey Data project).

   Locally, we have set up fourteen university data platforms in France, to make existing data known, but also to support members of the scientific community and students in the use of these data.

   My work is thus shared between a large part of coordination (which leads me to travel a lot by train in France, and sometimes by plane in Europe) and a more administrative part of setting up and following up project files.

   Today, I work from home: I do a lot of videoconferencing. I find it to be more tiring than physical meetings (even if it means that I avoid travelling), and it is not as efficient, because you lose the informal relationships that are often rich in new ideas and may miss out on vital information which is important for innovation.

3. Can you highlight three main ways that your archive has supported researchers over the last few months?

   If we have to retain three main ways of supporting researchers over the last few months, here is my pick:

   - Our national and local teams support researchers through training programmes and participating in the development and implementation of research projects. These activities have increased over the last year.

   We support researchers on issues such as FAIR Data, data management plan (DMPs) and GDPR compliance. Several factors have shaken up the conditions for the collection and dissemination of data meaning that our support is increasingly valuable: the 2016 national "Law for a Digital Republic"; the implementation at a national level of European rules on the protection of personal data (EUGDPR); and the development of the Open Science Plan S at the Ministry of Higher Education and Research since 2018.

   - We support researchers in the collection and dissemination of data around COVID-19. Obviously, these are projects that needed reactivity, and the university data platforms were able to respond quickly!

   - We also continue less visible but essential technical negotiations with various data providers. The aim is to continue to expand our catalogue (> 100 new references in 2020) and to improve our services. For example, we will soon be able to use a DOI to identify all the data we distribute, even data sets that do not belong to us. This will greatly facilitate their citation in publications.

4. All COVID-19-related metadata are being harvested to the CESSDA Data Catalogue as they become available by the service providers. There are currently over 114 “covid” data sets. Which data sets stick out to you and why?

   It is always difficult to have to choose one set of data over another. I think that anything that can show the relevance of social sciences in the current context of a pandemic is positive. All the more so if it allows international comparisons (providing a perspective beyond local specificities) or fine geographical approaches, shedding light on local variations of phenomena.

   In the context of COVID-19, I am personally interested in studies that allow a better knowledge of the social factors of transmission, because the disease (and this one in particular) is not only a matter of medicine. I am also interested in the study of the consequences of the disease for society (from the point of view of social or gender relations in particular).

   So, rather than choosing a data set, I am taking advantage of this interview to advertise the World Pandemic Research Network (WPRN), which maintains a searchable global directory of the scientific resources available on the societal and human impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. It shows who works on what, where, in real time, and at a global level.

5. What is the French policy to accomplish FAIR Data?

   The Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation is very actively engaged in "fairisation".

   The Open Science Plan ("Ouvrir la science") launched in 2018 is a very strong signal to all French research stakeholders.

   In this context, data “fairisation” is a key element, and support is important for all initiatives (for example, France is one of the funders of the Research Data Alliance).

6. Your regional focus is diverse, from Western Europe to the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), to South Asia. How does your department work across borders to address transnational population and development issues?

   In the 2000s, my doctoral thesis focused on India, and I then worked in Senegal. For the last ten years I have been focusing on the Mediterranean area, sometimes zooming in on certain countries: Spain, Morocco, Egypt and of course France. I therefore continue to have a special focus on foreign data.

   Nevertheless, PROGEDO is not intended to work on data outside the country, although we are present to support French research units abroad (https://www.umifre.fr/ifre). For example, last year we signed an agreement with the CEDEJ to support them in the promotion of the data they produce in Egypt in partnership with local institutions. I recently co-edited a journal issue in partnership with them on digital archiving in the Arab world.

7. You focus mostly on population and development, spatial analysis (and geographic information), urbanisation. What project(s) are you working on at the moment?

   With Yoann Doignon from the University of Louvain, I am currently finishing a collective work on settlement. It is a volume that is part of a vast project to create an encyclopaedia of sciences. The field of Geography is coordinated by Denise Pumain as well as the sub-domain of demography. It is a formidable project led by the publishers ISTE and Wiley which aims to offer a synthesis of global current scientific knowledge available in several languages.

   We are also working with my colleagues from the Mediterranean Demographic Observatory (Isabelle Blöss-Widmer, Aix-Marseille University; Yoann Doignon, UC Louvain; Elena Ambrosetti, Sapienza in Rome) on a book on population dynamics and demographic change in the Mediterranean, which will be published by Springer at the end of the year.

8. You are based in Marseille and have an office in Paris. How have your travelling routines been affected by the ongoing pandemic and what will they look like in the coming months?

   In France, we have the high-speed train (TGV), which puts Marseille just three hours from Paris. I do not travel there and back every day! I am lucky enough to have my parents in the Parisian suburbs, which also allows me to see them at the same time.

   We also have university data platforms in many French cities, so I used to travel a lot. I only used the train though, which allowed me to work while I am travelling. It is very comfortable and I like the atmosphere!

   However, since March 2020, my travels have all been replaced by videoconferences. It is efficient, but still less friendly. I hope that we will come out of this crisis quickly, as I am looking forward to meeting all the partners of PROGEDO, especially my CESSDA colleagues, in Bergen or elsewhere in Europe. If videoconferences allow us to make progress on issues, there are many exchanges on projects that take place in the informal time around the meetings (coffee and lunch breaks).

9. What are you looking forward to in 2021 given the current situation?

   Like everyone else, I hope that 2021 will see the end of this health crisis, and I hope that its consequences will not be too tough on our societies. There are terrible individual situations, with many people suffering from the current conditions, from a health perspective, but also from an economic and psychological point of view.

   Professionally, 2021 will be an important year for PROGEDO. We have started the complete renovation of our data dissemination website, which is a major issue for our institution: to make the data accessible in the easiest possible way, while respecting the regulations. Our data must be "as open as possible and as closed as necessary" and this is a real challenge!

10. If you were the President of the European Commission for one day, what would you decide or do?

    The European Union must re-engage in research, including its support for the social sciences. In a rapidly changing world, and especially given the pressing climate of dealing with an ongoing global pandemic, supporting populations, and coming out of the crisis requires an understanding of how societies function.

    We cannot hope to continue to live in the peace and comfort that we currently enjoy in Europe without massive investment in the construction and good functioning of the European Union. A strengthened Union would also help create global economic, political, and social stability and have positive ripple effects for the rest of the world. For this, we need common projects, and what better project than science?

More information:

Sébastien Oliveau's website

Sébastien Oliveau is on Twitter!

Previous article in this series: CESSDA asks ten questions to Tiziana Ferrari.

The CDC covers a diverse range of data across Europe, including quantitative, qualitative and mixed modes, longitudinal and cross-sectional, national and cross-national data. It currently provides access to nearly 27,000 studies in ten languages held at our national Service Providers across Europe.

How does this new release of the CDC benefit our users?

The CESSDA Data Catalogue now has enhanced search options:

• Search language selection next to the search box facilitates language choice.
• Improved filtering options makes it easier to refine searches and find more relevant data.
• Upgraded search engine brings improved stemming (e.g. vote, votes, voting, voted) and synonyms (e.g. teleworking, distance working, remote working) performance to search requests in each metadata language.
• Highlighting search terms in the results makes them easier to find.
• When the user clicks on a topic or a keyword in the detailed study view, the system carries out a search for other data that includes that term.

We also wanted to make sure that the CDC was accessible for users with disabilities and therefore made some accessibility improvements:

• The study detail page now uses HTML sections, which divide parts of the study description, like the abstract, title and methodology, into logical sections.
• It also uses headers and paragraphs giving each section a logical structure, with titles and content.
• Both of these changes make it easier for screen readers to read out studies based on the logical structure of the page.

Other user-friendly improvements:

• Better organisation and naming of information elements in the detailed study view, to facilitate browsing the information content.
• More information and links to the controlled vocabularies and thesauri used in study descriptions.
• Fully revised and extended User Guide in the ‘About’ section.

There is also a lot of work being done “behind the scenes” to maintain and update the user interface and the display of metadata collections.

Two other products that feed into the catalogue:

• The CESSDA Controlled Vocabularies Service (CVS) secures consistency in the use of controlled vocabularies across archives. The service allows users to maintain, translate, browse and and download vocabularies used to describe social sciences data. The terminology used in the Methodology section of study description in the data catalogue is often based on DDI Alliance vocabularies managed in CVS: Time Method, Analysis Unit, Sampling Procedure and Mode of Collection. The topic terms are taken from CESSDA Topic Classification in many cases.
• ELSST – European Language Social Science Thesaurus, is the online thesaurus showing definitions and relationships of keywords in the social sciences across fourteen languages. Many service providers use ELSST keywords for their study descriptions. The keywords are found at the bottom of the detailed study view.

Want to learn more about the CESSDA Data Catalogue?

Join the webinar in the coming weeks. More information will be published soon.

We have invited a content expert from a Service Provider to explain why and how to use the CESSDA Data Catalogue and a researcher to test it and provide a user's perspective.

This time, we talk with Gustav Nilsonne, a researcher in neuroscience and metascience at Karolinska Institutet and Stockholm University. Both of these institutions are a part of the Swedish National Data Service (SND) consortium and SND is the Swedish Service Provider of CESSDA.

Gustav Nilsonne is also the coordinator of SND’s domain specialists, a position that includes coordination of the national domain specialist activities, as well as being a bridge between SND’s headquarters and the domain specialists in the SND consortium universities.

In his research in neuroscience, Gustav focuses on sleep and diurnal rhythms, and communication between the brain and immune system. Topics which indeed appear relevant after one year of living during a pandemic!

CESSDA asked Gustav Nilsonne to answer a few questions.

1. How are you coping with the COVID-19 crisis and how do you make sure that you get work done?

   Generally I am quite happy with working from home, because of the increased flexibility and freedom. I have had to learn how to plan breaks and things to do outside, so I don’t spend all day in front of the screen, which easily happens if I don’t make a conscious effort. We have a cat at home, who helps by coming over a few times a day, requesting that I come from the keyboard and pet her instead.

2. Can you point out one benefit and one drawback of your change in routine as a result of the pandemic?

   Less travel, due to conferences and meetings moving online, is a considerable improvement for me. With more control over my day, I find it easier to keep up regular exercise, sleep, and meal habits. A drawback is missing out on the informal conversations with colleagues in the corridors and coffee rooms.

3. Can you tell us about your ongoing research projects and how COVID-19 may affect the road ahead in terms of your research?

   We had to stop data collection prematurely in the spring of 2020 in a major research project of mine, involving MRI scanning of sleep deprived volunteers. The funding period was close to ending, and we were not going to be able to resume collecting data for this project. For some time now, I have been moving towards gathering less data and doing more secondary analysis of existing data, in order to reach larger sample sizes and more reliable findings. There are so many datasets out there just waiting to be combined and analysed in new ways. I think that the pandemic will accelerate this move.

4. Sweden is one of twelve selected countries in European Social Survey new web panel. Wave 1 of the survey includes questions on vaccinations against COVID-19. What are you looking forward to as a result of this web survey?

   Comparative data on a large scale are an indispensable research tool for investigating differences between countries and populations. While I am not very knowledgeable about details such as the representativeness of this survey, I do expect it will be of great value. One question that will be particularly interesting to me concerns how answers regarding attitudes to vaccinations will compare to actual uptake between countries.

5. How can the data collected by large international surveys such as the ESS, ISSP, EVS, WVS and Eurobarometers service (or others) the research community in the aftermath of the coronavirus?

   The scientific community has responded to the pandemic with a great flurry of activity, and we are seeing a steeply rising wave of publications. However, high-quality investigations of community interventions to combat COVID-19 have been few and far between. Important public health and social questions are being debated quite hotly, but on a shaky foundation when it comes to evidence. Which kinds of public health advice, recommendations, and restrictions are most effective and cause the least harm?

   I hope that in the aftermath of this pandemic we will build a readiness to test societal interventions. When the next pandemic comes, I would love to see “sleeper protocols” for scientific studies ready to be activated, with ethics approval and other administrative obstacles already cleared. Proper comparison studies of different interventions, such as recommendations on distancing, hand-washing, masks, limits on commercial and cultural activities, and so on, could then be started immediately. This kind of studies should be coupled with large-scale data collection efforts, and preferably tie in with existing registries and population-based surveys.

6. Do you think that the importance of social science data will be better recognised as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic?

   The morbidity and mortality burden of COVID-19 has turned out to strongly follow a socioeconomic gradient. Risks of hospitalisation and death are considerably higher in deprived areas. Factors such as income and migration status have emerged as strong determinants. This highlights that public health efforts against COVID-19, and by extension likely against future pandemics, need to consider a wide range of social factors. Important data will continue to come out for years to come, and will hopefully be able to disentangle to some extent the mechanisms behind this inequity, e.g. crowded living conditions, precarious employment, health and protective behaviours, etc.

   The COVID-19 pandemic has also shown that near-real-time availability of high-quality data is crucial for monitoring not only case numbers and mortality, but also social and economic consequences of the pandemic. We need better access to data from health records, registries, and administrative databases. Challenges include interoperable IT systems, semantics and harmonization, e.g. standardized variable names and metadata, administrative hurdles, and a lack of consensus on appropriate safeguards for privacy. The COVID-19 pandemic showcases that good data can save lives, and I hope this experience will provide an impetus for better solutions.

7. Your research in metascience concerns reproducibility and openness in science. You are also one of Sparc Europe's European Open Data Champions. Can you tell us more about this?

   I take great interest in reproducibility and openness, just as you say. For instance, I have been involved in several studies of analytical and empirical reproducibility in science on humans. Currently I am particularly interested in building a theory of the choices researchers make when they analyse data. They traverse a space of possible paths, all of which may be reasonable, but which make different assumptions and which may yield different results.

   Fundamentally, I regard data as the building block of cumulative knowledge, and I believe it is very important that we make our data open, both when we create new data and with regard to data which already exist, scattered about the face of the earth, but which is at risk of erosion and loss. We need knowledge and skills (the CESSDA management guide is an excellent resource). We also need infrastructures. Data repositories are relatively well developed, but further support is needed for curation and sharing of data. Universities need to invest in data stewards, data librarians and similar functions to ensure that research can be supported with skills and with enough hands to do the work of preserving and sharing data. Funders need to explicitly support data management and sharing as a part of the research cycle, and we also need dedicated funding targeted at saving data from old and existing research, which is at risk.

8. What software platforms and tools for research data sharing and analysis are you currently using?

   For sharing research data, I use different repositories depending on the needs: the Swedish National Data Service, with which I am affiliated of course, but also openneuro.org for brain imaging data, Zenodo for its integration with GitHub, and sometimes others such as the Open Science Framework (OSF). For analysis, I like to use R because it is open and also very powerful, and for code sharing I prefer GitHub/Zenodo.

9. What are the main barriers for the reuse of research data and code at an international level and what is for you the key to improving research data management?
   

   We need to shift the perspective on what is a scientific contribution. Instead of counting publications and impact factors, we need to value data and code as scientific outputs. The technical means are already in place. It is fully possible to publish data and code with permanent identifiers so they can be properly cited and attributed. Funding agencies, when they assess grant applications, need to develop ways to ask researchers to show the value of their data and code, alongside or instead of publication lists. A conversation has started on responsible assessment and metrics, but much remains to be done.

10. What are you most looking forward to achieving in 2021 given the current circumstances?
    

    Now I have settled in to working from home, and I do not anticipate travelling to meetings and conferences this year. I hope to be able to find more time to write instead. For instance, I am working on a theoretical framework for the relationship between data loss and scientific inference, which I would love to put into print. I also hope to be able to write more about open science and reproducibility for the general public and/or by writing blogs.

More information:

Gustav Nilsonne's website

Gustav Nilsonne is on Twitter!

Gustav Nilsonne Appointed SND’s Domain Specialist Coordinator

Recommendations for Covid-19 data from the Research Data Alliance (RDA): Rekommendationer om Covid-19-data från Research Data Alliance (RDA) (interview in Swedish)

Find out how CESSDA is supporting researchers on our COVID-19 page. Our flagship product, the CESSDA Data Catalogue is a platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data, including on issues related to the pandemic. All COVID-19-related metadata will be harvested to the Data Catalogue, as they become available by the Service Providers.

See the previous article in this series: COVID-19 Interview series – CESSDA COVID-19 Ambassador – Helena Laaksonen.

The purpose of the job is: initiation, planning, design, execution, monitoring, controlling and closure of internal and/or external CESSDA projects.

Find out more.

Deadline

The closing date for applications is 28 February 2021.

You will be guided by different European experts who are - on a daily basis - busy ensuring long-term access to valuable social science datasets, available for discovery and reuse at one of the CESSDA social science data archives.

The user story, across disciplines

We want to showcase the added value of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide for the management of your carefully collected research data. We asked Peter Čerče, Data Officer, Migrant Children and Communities in a Transforming Europe (MICREATE) project to explain how it helped him. In the H2020 project, he looks at the ethical challenges with interview data.

"In preparing the initial version of the MiCREATE DMP we were using the DMPonline tool, offered in the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide. The guide turned out to be very helpful for working in the consortium of fifteen partners from twelve different countries. The CESSDA DMEG directs you to the European diversity issues in every step of the research data lifecycle."

More information:

Peter’s full story:

Adapt your own Data Management Plan on Data Protection. Download the tool.

CESSDA held a webinar on the Why and How to use the DMEG. You can find recordings on YouTube & slides on Zenodo.

Read the previous user story: CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide User Story - Ana Slavec, PhD in Statistics, used chapter five “protect” which focuses on data protection for her work with personal data.

It is the second in a series of articles. The previous one was "#1 Technical documentation as code" and the next will be "#3 Configuration as code", both of which take a similar approach to this one.

More information:

Read the full article by our CESSDA Cloud Platform Delivery Director and Technical Working Group Leader John Shepherdson on LinkedIn.

See the previous article in this series: CESSDA Platform – Taking a new approach: #1 Technical Documentation As Code.

CESSDA ERIC’s expertise in the open data and research infrastructure ecosystem, particularly in the social sciences, will enhance EURHISFIRM’s technical and scientific competencies and will support the project’s research infrastructure design in incorporating cutting-edge developments from the European data community.

CESSDA ERIC is also the coordinator of the SSHOC project (Social Science and Humanities Open Cloud), in which EURHISFIRM partners participates. SSHOC is a project within the framework of the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud).

With the addition of CESSDA ERIC, the EURHISFIRM consortium’s membership expands to 12 institution in 8 countries across Europe.

EURHISFIRM will design a world-class research infrastructure (RI) to connect, collect, collate, align, and share detailed, reliable, and standardised long-term company-level datafor Europe to enable researchers, policymakers and other stakeholders to analyse, develop, and evaluate effective strategies to promote investment and economic growth.

To achieve this goal, EURHISFIRM develops innovative tools to spark a “big data revolution” in the historical social sciences and to open access to cultural heritage in close cooperation with existing RIs.

Visit the project website.

As the national service provider for the European social science research infrastructure CESSDA, FSD provides data discovery and deposit services and curates and preserves digital research data collected primarily to study society, population, and cultural phenomena.

— Applying to be included in the roadmap was a joint effort of many FSD experts, so we are all happy and relieved of the outcome. This is the third National Roadmap and each time we have succeeded in including FSD and CESSDA, says Helena Laaksonen, Director of FSD.

Regarding future FIRI (Finnish Research Infrastructures) funding it has been outlined that most of the funding calls are open to the research infrastructures included in the roadmap.

Read the full story on the FSD website.

You will be guided by different European experts who are - on a daily basis - busy ensuring long-term access to valuable social science datasets, available for discovery and reuse at one of the CESSDA social science data archives.

The user story, across disciplines

We want to showcase the added value of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide for the management of your carefully collected research data. We asked Ana Slavec, PhD in Statistics to explain how it helped her.

In her postdoctoral project, she looks at the use of survey questionnaires to study human patterns of behaviour within the built environment to improve occupant well-being.

“I learned about CESSDA when working at the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives. When I was preparing a data management plan for my postdoctoral project, I came across the Data Management Expert Guide and used it to plan the use of data. For that task I read several chapters but the most useful one was the one on data protection, which is of crucial importance when working with personal data. In particular, I valued tips on how to process personal data, how to gain informed consent from research participants, including for data archiving and sharing, and best practices for data anonymisation.”

Join the discussion

Want to learn more about the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide?

Join the webinar on 3 December at 14.00 CET.

We have invited a researcher, trainer and data management expert to discuss the why and how to use the guide for Research Data Management in the social sciences and beyond.

Register here.

More information:

Ana’s full story:

Adapt your own Data Management Plan on Data Protection. Download the tool.

Freely accessible and covered by a CC-BY-SA 4.0 licence, it is now available on the CESSDA Platform as one of a suite of web-based tools.

ELSST consists of over 3,000 concepts (keywords) and covers the core social science disciplines: politics, sociology, economics, education, law, crime, demography, health, employment, information and communication technology and, increasingly, environmental science. It is used for data discovery within CESSDA and facilitates access to data resources across Europe, independent of domain, resource, language or vocabulary.

ELSST provides a structured, controlled vocabulary of keywords that can be assigned to diverse items within a collection, such as datasets or publications. Using a thesaurus such as ELSST, data providers (such as data archives, research centres and libraries) can attach similar keywords to items in their collections that are different in nature but cover similar topics. This ensures that materials in the collections are described in a consistent way.

In turn, this helps researchers in two ways; making catalogue searches easier by providing a set list of keywords to choose search terms from, and improving the accuracy of search results by ensuring that all items covering the selected topic are found.

ELSST is developed by a team drawn from several CESSDA Service Providers, who collaborate to ensure ELSST concepts remain current and relevant to researchers across the social sciences.

It is currently available in 14 languages: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

More information:

Read the ELSST documentation to find out more about the development, management and structure of the thesaurus, and recent updates to ELSST.

Hans Jørgen greatly valued pan-European and international cooperation ensuring both of his home institutions, DDA and SND, played active roles in a number of EU funded projects and European and global organisations like IFDO, RDA, and DDI.

For CESSDA, he played a pivotal role in building it as both an international and a formal institution. His enthusiasm guided him in serving CESSDA first as the Secretary of CESSDA network of data archives for more than 11 years, then as its president from 2010 to 2013, when CESSDA became a formal institution under Norwegian Law.

At that point in CESSDA's history, Hans Jørgen became a member of the CESSDA Board of Directors, thus further stirring developments and efforts for CESSDA to become a formal European Infrastructure. Early dreams became a reality when CESSDA was pronounced an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium) under the auspices of the European Commission in June 2017.

Hans Jørgen’s legacy is deeply embedded in the CESSDA community. Our deepest condolences go to his family and loved ones.

Ron Dekker,

CESSDA ERIC

How did people act and behave during this crisis, and what about in a future crisis? Looking back, what would have been an optimal strategy for a country to choose? To answer these types of questions, and many more that will arise, we need a social data platform. – Ron Dekker, CESSDA Director

“Social science data archives exist in over 35 European countries, and all of them participate in CESSDA. In 2019, 20 of them were members, and the others were partner organisations, several of which are in the process of becoming a CESSDA member. Together they provide access to tens of thousands of data sets. A growing number of these can be found via the joint CESSDA Data Catalogue as member data archives add their metadata to the catalogue (over 35,000 data sets on 1 September 2020).” – Peter Doorn, Chair of the General Assembly and Director of DANS

The CESSDA Annual Report 2019 covers activities and results of all of our working groups (training, trust, tools and services, technical) as well as our widening activities, communications, projects, governance and management, and presents the financial information of the past year.

This year, we decided to ask a local Bergen artist, Nadja Asghar, to create unique illustrations for this report. It was our way of showing support for the arts sector during the COVID-19 lockdown. Find out more on her website.

All of our annual reports can be consulted here.

Helena Laaksonen, Director of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), was appointed as CESSDA's official COVID-19 Ambassador in June.

CESSDA asked Helena Laaksonen a few questions.

1. Do you think that the importance of social science data will be better recognised as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic?

   The current COVID-19 pandemic seems to appear as mainly a medical question for politicians even though the effects are also economic with restaurants closing temporarily or shutting down for example. The social science research community could make more noise as they can offer relevant data even without yet having access to results from COVID-19 related studies. We can look at comparatively similar situations from the past.

   It is my belief that it is not only medical research into COVID-19 which can and will produce answers to the challenges we face. I therefore wish for more recognition of the importance of social science data, however this will require more work from experts and researchers in the area.

2. What is your role as CESSDA COVID-19 Ambassador?

   My role is very much of a ‘middle woman’ so to say. Several people have reached out to me over the past weeks and months, asking me about CESSDA data archives, and staff in various data archives as well. I have been collecting questions and trying to find answers for these interested parties. My role has therefore been to be a contact point and to relay relevant information.

3. All COVID-19-related metadata are being harvested to the CESSDA Data Catalogue as they become available by the service providers. There are currently over 30 “covid” data sets. Which data sets stick out to you and why?

   My first impression is that the diversity of data in the CESSDA Data Catalogue shows that service providers archive a variety of data. FSD does not usually archive medical data, for instance, though some service providers do. There is not only social or political science data there, but a range of data. For me, the most interesting data are those that deal with social phenomena in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic.

   I see the pandemic as a social phenomenon. You asked me which data sets stuck out. I therefore pick the GESIS Panel Special Survey on the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak in Germany and the Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe, model fit for Bayesian model 2020, which is provided by the UK Data Service. These are examples of what the social sciences can provide.

4. What has changed for your data archive since the onset of the pandemic? Have certain services been prioritised and why?

   For our data archive not that much has changed for our clients, which are researchers and students using and depositing data. Everything is digital and all can be done online. What has changed is where we are working. We are at home. If COVID-19 had broken out a year earlier, it would not have been possible.

   As part of the merger between the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology into the new Tampere University, FSD’s servers were transferred to a data centre hosted by the University. All FSD services are run in the new server infrastructure; these include, for instance, the FSD website, Penna data collection tool, and Aila Data Service. We also use university laptops and the IT systems and support are now offered by the university.

   The University created a special VPN connection for FSD’s use, so that we can access our own software and tools and for example the data can be processed and published, and even software development teams can work from home. These technical upgrades were sped up as a result of the pandemic hitting Finland. At least in that sense, the timing was perfect, even though I would of course rather not have experienced this situation. What’s more our carbon footprint decreased as a result of having a centralised server solution (read more here).

5. Can you highlight three main ways that your archive has supported researchers over the last few months?

   The three main ways that we have supported researchers are:
   1) The services we already have (e.g. reuse and downloads of data have so far been higher than last year. This is the case for every month since COVID-19 began, compared to previous years at the same time.).
   2) Data ingest via the data portal, processing and publishing data (without having to be in the office).
   3) Guides on data protection and consent (how should a research subject be informed about the data used, etc.), on Research Data Management, as well as a methods guide. These guides are used by students and sometimes methods lecturers. FSD intends to publish an updated version of the methods guide, since the current version dates back to 2003, and its use is growing. It is actually the most popular service on our website!

6. CESSDA launched a COVID-19 webpage earlier this year. How do you see this evolving? Do you have any suggestions of how we could show the importance of our activities for SSH research?

   We are already and will continue to promote any relevant data being deposited and remind researchers about data sharing so that they collect the data correctly and follow the legislation. Personally, I am a bit worried in these times that people have been too busy collecting data quickly and not properly considering that the data should be available for reuse especially for future similar pandemics.

   We had a discussion at the Service Providers’ Forum meeting a couple of weeks ago about COVID-19 and how to respond to the pandemic from a research data perspective. We exchanged views about responsibilities, topics, resources and timing.

   I think that we should organise some webinars that relate to COVID-19. The topics and details still need to be discussed, though the overall aim is to assist researchers doing research on COVID-19 from a social science or humanities perspective.

7. How can the data collected by large international surveys such as the ESS, ISSP, EVS, WVS and Eurobarometers service the research community in the aftermath of the coronavirus?

   These surveys can serve the research community in interconnected ways. Some of them now have specific COVID-19 questions. For example, the ESS has included 20 questions in its survey round 10 (2020/21), and SHARE carried out telephone interviews in June including a special “SHARE COVID-19” questionnaire to see how older people are coping with the health and socioeconomic impacts of the pandemic.

   The surveys include a variety of questions about trust and health and what is special about these surveys is that they are harmonised so that you can make country comparisons. You can also do that with surveys found in the CESSDA Data Catalogue, though you need to take into account that they are not harmonised.

8. The second principle of the manifesto is to “make scientific papers and research available in open access without delay and following the FAIR principles via preprint servers or public repositories (...) In particular, make COVID-19 research data available through the European COVID-19 Data Platform.” How have CESSDA national data archives been contributing to this platform?

   The platform appears to be mostly focused on medical data. It could be an issue if there is a specific platform where the European Commission wants researchers to upload the data then that is problematic. If it’s just the metadata that is fine.

   Furthermore, what is the timespan for keeping the platform online? I think that it is a good idea to have a place to find all data related to COVID-19 but when so many resources are put into the service then you should think about how the data and research is managed afterwards. This is why we have data archives taking care of long-term preservation where data is findable and accessible long into the future.
   My general comment on the manifesto is that I think that it is a good thing that results are open and shared so that we can better tackle the pandemic. That way we are focusing on data access.

   However, it is important to remember that data is collected and managed so that it is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) in the long run. By abiding by the FAIR Data principles, we ensure that we as a society are ready with easy access to relevant data when the next pandemic hits us.

9. How can academia-industry joint research help us come out of this pandemic?

   I believe that an important area where academia-industry joint research can contribute to a safer future is cooperation in developing both services and software that take into account human behaviour and attitudes, as well as an urban environment which can accommodate our changing needs.

10. What resources would you recommend to social science researchers interested in COVID-19?

    It depends on what kind of research they are doing and what kind of methods they use, and what research problem they have. They can find data from a great many service providers around Europe in the CESSDA Data Catalogue and in the ICPSR data catalogue which comprises both US and data from other countries. The ICPSR also has a COVID-19 Data Repository.

    If researchers are more interested in language data, they could look at the Language Bank of Finland and its equivalent in other countries, accessible via the CLARIN tools and services. These language banks host materials from previous pandemics, for example from the Spanish flu. They contain a wide variety of text and speech corpora and tools for studying them.

    On a general note, I would also recommend researchers to turn to national archives and existing European Research Infrastructures such as CESSDA, CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS, etc.

More information:

COVID-19 and FSD’s services
New server environment improves reliability and conserves energy
Find out more about the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD).
Find out how CESSDA is supporting researchers on our COVID-19 page. Our flagship product, the CESSDA Data Catalogue is a platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data, including on issues related to the pandemic. All COVID-19-related metadata will be harvested to the Data Catalogue, as they become available by the Service Providers.

See the previous article in this series: COVID-19 Interview series – Political elections – Bernt Aardal.

CESSDA is continually improving its PaaS processes and toolchains, and has recently adopted three new approaches, intended to: improve the quality and availability of relevant technical documentation; simplify the deployment of microservices to managed clusters; eliminate the gap between what should be deployed and what is actually deployed.

This article looks at how the CESSDA Platform team goes about improving the quality and availability of relevant technical documentation: firstly by touching on the background relating to the theory and practice of ‘documentation as code’; secondly by looking in detail at CESSDA’s implementation.

It is the first in a series of articles. The next one will be ‘#2 Deploying microservices with Helm’, which will take a similar approach to this one.

More information:

Read the full article by our CESSDA Cloud Platform Delivery Director and Technical Working Group Leader John Shepherdson on LinkedIn.

CESSDA asked Bernt Aardal, a renowned political scientist from the University of Oslo, a few questions.

1. Do you think that the importance of social science data will be better recognised as a result of the current COVID-19 pandemic?

   That is a good question. Firstly, in at least a Norwegian context, I think that the recognition of social science research and data is already high. It is quite interesting to see that the focus has been quite a bit on the medical aspect, how contagious it is, the death rate and so on. At the same time, we now see the public response being a problem. People are protesting; they are not accepting the directions given by the authorities.

   The directions given vary between different countries. There is a need to have social science data, both on public opinion and on public response in order for us to address what consequences the COVID-19 pandemic will have for our societies. I think that it will awaken people, not the least authorities.
   We also see a difference here in terms of public trust, in politicians, in the government, and in the authorities. It will be interesting to observe how they react in these times of crisis.

   I certainly think that an understanding of why these social data are important will be more widespread. COVID-19 may boost the recognition of the need for this kind of data.

2. You have led the Norwegian Election Studies and have published many journal articles and several books on Norwegian elections, attitude formation, emotions and voting behaviour, public opinion, trust in government, etc. In your opinion, what role can politics play in a time of crisis?

   I think that these studies have given us an understanding, an insight into the mood of the public and the trust and confidence in public institutions.

   That could actually be very helpful and useful for the authorities in planning their measures. We see, at least to some extent, that the high trust countries in northern Europe have fewer problems with accepting severe measures than in countries with low public trust. We already know a lot about that from our previous research. We know that the US was particularly vulnerable because of the low confidence shown for several years. I think that the basis for public action is partly dependent on the kind of knowledge and research that we have been doing for many years. It means that we can, to some extent, also be able to predict the reactions among the public.

   Some of the first measures that the media took, just after the lockdown, were to engage public opinion firms to ask questions about, for example, to what extent people believed in the necessity of the lockdown and acceptance of the various measures. In Norway and many other countries, there were several surveys done continually, particularly in the first weeks and months. And, for instance, in this country, we saw that, that there was a great deal of confidence. In Norway, in Sweden, and in Denmark, we have seen that there is a lot of confidence in the measures. That contributed to making it possible for the authorities to go forward with it. In the US, that has been more of a problem because it has not been accepted in the same way.

3. What are your expectations for this year’s US Presidential elections and next year’s Norwegian Parliamentary elections? How may they be affected by COVID-19?

   To make a prediction about the US election I think would be hazardous. Seen from far away, in this country, we are not that impressed with the way the President has handled the pandemic, but then again, US politics is something of and for itself. It is very difficult to really understand what is going on.

   Of course, some of what has been said in the campaign in the US is very difficult and hard for non-Americans to really understand. At the same time, we do not have an easy situation in this country speaking about next year's election. To some extent, one would think that after eight years, two consecutive election periods, it would be time for a change.

   However, in Norway with the current complexity of politics involving many parties, we've seen that it's not easy to build a coherent coalition of these parties, neither to the left nor to the right, which means that it is quite an open election next year.

   The odds would perhaps be a little higher for a change of government, but at the same time that is far from a given. I don't think that that necessarily has much to do with the pandemic. I think we've seen a boost in popularity for the Conservative Party and the Prime Minister Erna Solberg.

   But that has not spilled over to the other government parties, so it is an open question. In this country, you need coalition partners. No party is big enough to have a majority or be that big that you can have a government on your own. I don't think the pandemic will have that much of an effect on the Norwegian election, and to the extent it does, I think it will be in favour of the Conservative Party.

   However, the measures for handling the pandemic have been very ‘bipartisan’, as we say in the US. It is sort of ‘multipartisan’ in this country because we have so many parties, and there has been in general an agreement across the political spectrum about the initial measures. Now, we see that there are criticisms of some of the current policies from the opposition parties, but, if you look at the big picture, it has been more of a consensus.

   The pandemic measures have not been that controversial actually. Some small tweaks have been discussed but not the measures as a whole.

4. What are some of the challenges with the data collected by large international surveys such as the ESS, ISSP, EVS, WVS and Eurobarometers?

   Yes, there is a paradox in this field of data archives and the accessibility of data: that we have more and more data, and they are more and more easily easy to get hold of. At the same time, I think that a challenge would be to inspire younger colleagues and scholars to really dig into that database. Particularly in my department, there are not that many survey researchers left. It varies a little, but both in this country and other countries, we have plenty of data, more data than ever before and the challenge is really to make use of it. We are not just collecting data for the archives or for posterity.

   Of course, we see that there are challenges pertaining to declining response rates. There are some major surveys being done that maybe would not have been accepted just a few decades ago because of the low response rates.

   In the Norwegian election studies, we started out with a response rate between 80 and 90%. However, we are now among the best and we are hovering around 50%. In some, some countries, there are 10 or 20% response rates or even lower.

   And then you also have the kind of data generated by different sources, where you are not that certain that the quality checks are as good as they should be. CESSDA has a very important job to do, to facilitate collaboration, facilitate standards and keep the standards also for the years to come, so we can have at least the best data that we are able to get. Pressure on economic resources can be a challenge. It is costly and it also takes time to process data as you are doing at CESSDA archives, but it is more important than ever. There is a tendency that people tend to make their own private databases. Collect their own data and keep it for themselves. To some extent, it can seem that developing and keeping your own database is an asset when you are applying for jobs or applying for scholarships.

   I think it is important to uphold the rationale for having institutions like CESSDA and NSD. To receive grants for the infrastructure, you need to prove that people are using the data and that you are not putting everything into a vault.

5. How can they service the research community in the aftermath of the coronavirus?

   I think that it will depend on to what extent they ask questions that are seen as relevant. I think that it will be important to hunt through the databases, through all the comparative, large surveys, and other kinds of data, with the aim of finding questions, that could be relevant.

   And I also think that this will have an impact on new projects, new surveys. You will want to include questions about the pandemic. In the literature about political behaviour, political history, nation building, state building, Stein Rockan had a very interesting concept called “critical junctures”. A critical juncture is a critical point in time where something important happens. Some effects may be short-term, but I think the pandemic will have a long-term effect because it has implications for almost all spheres of society, the economy, social interactions, and the social base. I think it is difficult to find a sphere that is not affected by this. So, I think this will occupy social scientists for a long time in the future.

   People will really go into the old surveys and databases and search for relevant data and in particular comparative data will be crucial. Social science research is continuous. It is a continuous project, no matter what it is. It is almost meaningless today to have any kind of a social science empirical project that is limited in time. I think that you need to see social events, in a time frame and you need time series data.

   I think that that there will be an increased interest in data in the CESSDA archives. There are implications on the macro level, on the meso level, and on the micro level, and all these things need to be put together.

   Many people now maybe think that medical research is the priority number one. And, of course, it will be very high on the agenda to find the vaccine to help us understand the virus. But I think maybe the next important issue will be how people are responding to this, how it affects them.

   We have seen that if the government measures are not accepted among the general public, we can all be worse off. We have seen protests against facemasks also in Europe. It’s almost impossible to understand that sort of a wishful thinking, that people think that it's not that important, or it's not that dangerous anymore.

   I think there will be renewed interest for social data and for finding out about impacts and implications of the pandemic. As I said, there are historical junctures that have lasting impact on society, and I think this will be one of them.

   It is very good that the ESS are quick in their response to this. And the ESS this is a well-established and well-recognised international effort so that is great news!

6. What findings from your research on electoral process and its role in representative democracy, voting behaviour and opinion formation seem particularly relevant in the current situation?

   Our research on political trust is perhaps the most relevant and important now, particularly as we have both good national and international data that make comparisons possible. The current situation presents us with opportunities for comparative research because Norway, Sweden, and Denmark have chosen different approaches to tackling the pandemic.

   The Nordic countries are in the top tier in international studies when it comes to general trust in politicians, parties and the political process. Public trust has had an influence on the measures taken by the authorities. In the Nordic countries, we believe in science and have a generalized trust in the authorities, which I think has helped them when deciding what measures to take. The measures they did take were quite drastic during lockdown, and I think that would have been much more difficult if they didn’t know that there was trust in the political system.

7. How is your current research affected by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic?

   We are now planning a survey for next year’s parliamentary election and there is a need to include measures of the reactions to the pandemic. We will be keeping our eyes and ears open for other research projects that may be coming up with good questions on the topic.

   I have been studying emotional responses, and we plan to work together with a colleague who is now finishing his master’s in psychology – he is both a political scientist and psychologist. We started in 2017 for the first time to bring political psychology back into electoral research. We are now trying to expand on that work in the next election study. In the 50s and 60s, there was a lot of focus on political psychology and election studies, though it is less so today. There is not that much contact between those disciplines here in Norway.

   The pandemic is a very good example of an event that may trigger a lot of emotional responses, which could also help us in understanding the outcome of the election. For example, to what extent do they feel that their emotional concerns have been met by the parties and politicians.

   I need to discuss this further with my research group, though I think it's obvious that we need to bring these two perspectives and frameworks together.

8. What do you see as the main challenges and channels for introducing more people to academic research and enhancing citizen engagement?

   There will always be talented people around. The question is how to find them and bring them together. We see now that the old style academic, sitting alone in their office, thinking deep thoughts for themselves, writing huge books, seems to be somewhat outdated.

   I think that the challenge now, to include new people, is that the ‘senior researchers’ need to open up and step down a level to give room to younger researchers. Even in this country, with all the social safeguards, it is a risky business to start a career in research. You never know how it will work out or if you will get a job after you have finished your PhD.

   Therefore, it is important that we have a good, supporting structure with research groups that include new people. It is harder to start out on your own in these days. Now you need to be a part of research programmes and take part in the collection of data, and that can be a challenge.

   There are more and more students in universities in and it is hard to have enough openings and opportunities for younger people. I think that Norway has a slight advantage in the institutes sector, as we have quite a number of independent, private institutions and research institutes, and they have more flexibility in recruiting people than the universities.

   So I think that this interplay between the universities and institutes sector can also be part of the solution to encourage people and give them opportunities to pursue a research career, because it's not the most well-paid job in the world, as we know.

   You need, of course, to have an ongoing public debate involving researchers. And I think you need to communicate with non-academics and with politicians and show them that your work is useful for them, as well as necessary for a democratic society. That of course also has implications for funding.

   Our project is very fortunate, because the election studies in Norway are actually the result of a unanimous vote in Parliament. Some years ago, we were having a hard time getting funded because the Research Council said that they did not have any programme for election studies and would not have in the future.

   Then we went to the Ministry of Education and Research, and asked them: “Don’t you think it's important to have election research studies in this country? We have been on it for almost 60 years now.” In the end, all the political parties supported the motion and it was a unanimous vote. They ordered a research programme for election studies to be created. We had to convince them that this is important research, both in terms of a pure research, but also because it is valuable for what they are doing.

9. Is there anything that you are looking forward to in 2020 given the current situation?

   What I actually look forward to is what we are starting now – the early process of starting up for the next election studies. I've been connected to election studies for 45 years. I was a young student in 1975 and I'm still here.

   So, I'm looking forward to that because it will be in partnership with these younger colleagues and see how we are meeting the demands of society and in particular the pandemic. How are we at risk? What is our response to that? What can we do in order to really understand the reactions, both in the short-term but also in the long term?

   There will also be a change in my daily routine, going from being a full-time professor and into retirement. I am not intending to work full-time as I also have other interests which I would like to pursue in my spare time. I am an amateur photographer and I have a lot of slides from the seventies that I need to scan and videos which I look forward to editing. Genealogy is another hobby of mine and I have three grandchildren that I will be spending time with in the coming months.

10. What resources would you recommend to researchers interested in political elections? What advice would you give a young political scientist?

    I was on the planning committee of the Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems (CSES) for ten years and met colleagues from all over the world. It’s a comparative data collection effort that is organised through the national election studies in a number of countries.

    The challenge with election studies is that they are continuous, studying election after election and collecting a lot of time series data, but that is a demanding situation for funding. It seems to me that some of the countries where they have succeeded best in securing funding is where they have relatively close connections to politicians and political parties themselves. This means that they have an ally for getting resources for this kind of research.

    You don't have to convince politicians that it's important to study elections and electoral behaviour, or public opinion. They are a lot of studies, but they are mostly commercial. Many politicians are eager to find a scientific research base, where people do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the research.

    This has been the case particularly in Sweden and Norway, but also in Denmark and other countries. There is a tension between pure research and applied research. You know, we as researchers want to decide on our own what we should study. At the same time, I think that that is a general challenge for social science research. We need to show that this is relevant for others, not only for ourselves and convince funders.

    It’s a difficult situation for many national election studies to get funding for new studies. We need to be impartial in our approach and not linked to a specific party or ideological group.

    My advice to a young political scientist in this field now is first to find a topic which fascinates you, a question that you find interesting, compelling. Then, combine a theoretical perspective with your own personal interest in the topic.

    Apply for PhD positions and scholarships and you will be brought into a wider community and find colleagues. You need to find some allies. And if you succeed in getting a scholarship, do not make the mistake that you can sit there alone in three or maybe four years and not interact with other researchers interested in the same field. You have to build small groups and attract others.

    I think that most of the successful research programmes that we see have started out like that, young scholars finding a common interest, and also helping each other, being part of a collective unit. Most people, of course, would like to be an outstanding individual, but not many are shaped that way. Furthermore, survey research is quite costly. It's very expensive, and it seems to be more and more expensive over time, so it's almost impossible to do that on your own.

More information:

Bernt Aardal was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of CESSDA from 2014 to 2019 (see history). Find out more about him here.

Find out how CESSDA is supporting researchers on our COVID-19 page. Our flagship product, the CESSDA Data Catalogue is a platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data, including on issues related to the pandemic. All COVID-19-related metadata will be harvested to the Data Catalogue, as they become available by the Service Providers.

The Open Science culture is gaining ground globally, though attitudes towards opening access to research data and data management practices are affected by researchers’ concerns about whether the opened data are reused.

A research article by Elina Late and Jaana Kekäläinen from Tampere University, published in the PLOS One journal, examined the use and users of data archived at FSD. The results show that FSD’s holdings are reused actively by students and researchers in various fields in Finland and abroad.

The study concentrated on the number and type (quantitative/qualitative) of downloaded data sets, the number of data citations, the demographic information about the data downloaders and the purposes for which data were downloaded. Data were drawn from FSD usage statistics for the years 2015–2018. The data used in the study is openly downloadable from Aila.

The results show fluctuation in the number of annual data downloads and a growing awareness about research data sharing and the benefits of data reuse. The number of total data downloads increased in 2016 and 2017 but decreased in 2018. In more recent statistics, which were not included in the study, the decreasing trend continued in 2019, however, we have observed a significant increase in the number of downloads so far in 2020.

In comparison with a previous study, the researchers noticed an overall increase in the reuse of both quantitative and qualitative data, and the proportion of qualitative data downloads has increased steadily since 2015.

The findings of the study also showed that data citation practices are improving and becoming more established. In comparison with a previous study, the study also noted an increase in data citations.

The demographic information about the data downloaders revealed that social science research data are also actively reused in fields not directly affiliated with the social sciences. Nearly one in five users downloading data represented natural, medical or technical sciences, or the humanities.

As FSD provides data descriptions in English for all data and translates quantitative data files on request into English, FSD data are also reused actively by foreign researchers both inside and outside Finland. The study noted that while most Finnish data reusers downloading data are students, reusers from abroad downloading data are mostly researchers.

The data used in the study is openly downloadable from FSD.

NSD – Norwegian Centre for Research Data was established as a national organisation for research infrastructure in 1971, and has been owned by the Ministry of Education and Research since 2003.

Our mission is to ensure free and open access to research data, and improve the basis for empirical research through a broad range of data and support services. NSD is the Norwegian service provider and member of the CESSDA Consortium, and participates in a number of large EU projects through CESSDA ERIC.

• When did your country become a member?

Norway has been a member since the very beginning, and was one of the founding members of CESSDA, when it was established as an informal umbrella organisation in 1976. Today, Norway is also the host country. CESSDA Main Office opened in September 2014, around the corner from NSD in Bergen. This means that we have been working very closely with our European colleagues!

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

As mentioned above, NSD has been active both politically and operationally in the organisation of CESSDA. Today, our expertise in data curation, FAIR Data, data protection (EU GDPR), access management and IT solutions (cf. NESSTAR) is perhaps our most important contribution, in addition to Norway's financial contribution to the operation of CESSDA.

NSD also has one of the largest professional communities in Europe when it comes to competence in the field of personal data protection in research.

NSD participates in several CESSDA EU and internal projects and contributes to the development of CESSDA tools and services. Our ongoing activities are within the SSHOC project, the CESSDA Metadata Model and the CESSDA Capability Development Model.

We also contribute to various CESSDA training events, and we took part in establishing the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG) and the future CESSDA Data Archive Guide (DAG).

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

Over the years, the cooperation with our colleagues within the CESSDA network has been instrumental for the development of NSD as a trusted digital repository and research infrastructure in Norway and beyond. This cooperation with other social science data archives and services – starting long before EU as well as national research infrastructure funding programmes became part of the agenda – gave us the opportunity to share expertise and technology, which has been a key benefit for us.

This professional cooperation across borders is also important in order to keep track of developments in the field of research data and allows us to innovate our products and services.

This partnership reinforces our role at a national and international level, as well as our competence, which in turn helps us to deliver higher-quality data services. In line with Norwegian research policy, the main goal of NSD has always been that Norwegian data is made accessible to researchers both within and outside of Norway – to enhance the possibilities for comparative and cross-border research.

In that context, being a part of CESSDA and having our data as ‘findable’ in the CESSDA Data Catalogue is important. Moreover, it is equally important for us to provide Norwegian researchers with access to data from other countries.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

The tools and services which are most of interest to us are the ones specifically for service providers, for example, the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide; CESSDA Training; CESSDA Vocabulary Service; and the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST).

We also provide data to the CESSDA Data Catalogue. We recommend the Data Catalogue for user access to data resources from all over Europe.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is a good introductory course for researchers on data management and data management planning. Better data planning helps increase the quality of data and supports good data documentation and GDPR compliance, which in turn increases data reusability.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

The joint efforts of the international community that make up CESSDA provides us with useful tools and services for the handling of research data in accordance with the FAIR principles. These tools and services are regularly improved and new ones developed, thanks to the EU-funded and internal work plan projects facilitated by CESSDA.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We find the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide to be a helpful introduction to data management for our users in general.

We recommend attending training webinars organised by CESSDA, and regularly check the CESSDA training website as it is useful for finding webinars and other resources. Finally, following @CESSDA_Data on Twitter is a sure way not to miss out on upcoming training events and news related to research data.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2020?

CESSDA can support us by continuing to develop new tools and services that help us (CESSDA Service Providers) make our own national data catalogues FAIR and further refine existing ones. We believe that fulfilling the FAIR Data principles will be possible only with strong cooperation between research data actors.

Moreover, CESSDA’s work at a political level is also crucial. Funding of data service providers at a national level is important to ensure a robust and sustainable European Research Infrastructure.

Read the last article in this series about the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences (FORS).

FORS is the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, an independent government-funded institution located on the campus of the University of Lausanne. As a national research infrastructure for the social sciences, FORS implements large-scale national and international surveys, offers data and research information services to researchers and academic institutions, and conducts methodological and thematic research. FORS represents Switzerland as observer in the General Assembly of the CESSDA ERIC, and FORS staff participate in coordinating bodies of CESSDA and its various projects.

• When‌ ‌did‌ ‌your‌ ‌country‌ ‌become‌ ‌a‌ ‌member?‌ ‌

Between 1993 and 2008, the data archive for the social sciences within SIDOS in Neuchâtel represented Switzerland within the CESSDA network. FORS inherited the SIDOS archive in 2008 and has been the Swiss service provider for CESSDA ever since.

• What‌ ‌does‌ ‌your‌ ‌organisation‌ ‌bring‌ ‌to‌ ‌CESSDA?‌ ‌

Representing Switzerland, we actively take part in CESSDA’s main governance bodies. We contribute to various CESSDA projects, sharing our longstanding know-how in the field of data archiving, as well as our more recent expertise in data management. We have also directly contributed to the establishment of new archives, especially in the Balkans, through the SERSCIDA and SEEDS projects. Some of these archives have now become full CESSDA members. As Switzerland’s main archive in the Social Sciences, we host high-quality FAIR research data that will be made available through the CESSDA Data Catalogue. Data are stored in our FORSbase digital repository, whose development has provided us with strong technical skills and knowledge, which also benefits international collaborations. Last but not least, we regularly promote CESSDA through our training activities.

• What‌ ‌tangible‌ ‌benefits‌ ‌does‌ ‌your‌ ‌organisation‌ ‌get‌ ‌out‌ ‌of‌ ‌being‌ ‌a‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌member?‌ ‌

We strongly benefit from our collaboration with CESSDA in many ways. Amongst some of the main benefits, we can state the following:

• It is extremely valuable to be part of an international network of experts, and to get to collaborate with partners with similar interests and learn from each other;
• There are lots of synergies and common goals across international institutions. Working together at developing tools and materials represents an opportunity to save valuable time at the institutional level, while increasing the quality of products;
• CESSDA offers many opportunities to work on interesting projects and to develop our in-house expertise;
• We directly benefit from the CESSDA tools;
• Receiving international certification (CoreTrustSeal of Approval) provides a most valuable asset for our institution, and a label of quality at both the national and international level;
• FORS visibility is increased by being a CESSDA member;
• FORS’ membership within CESSDA gives Swiss researchers easy access to data distributed by all member archives.

• Which‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌tools‌ ‌and/or‌ ‌services‌ ‌are‌ ‌of‌ ‌interest‌ ‌to‌ ‌your‌ ‌organisation?‌ ‌(see‌ ‌list‌ online)‌

FORS benefits from the collective expertise made available from being a CESSDA member, as well as collaboration on projects of common interest. We also benefit from CESSDA trainings and materials on topics regarding archival standards, best practices, and data management.

• How‌ ‌does‌ ‌the‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌Data‌ ‌Management‌ ‌Expert‌ ‌Guide‌ ‌help‌ ‌researchers‌ ‌to‌ ‌make‌ ‌their‌ ‌research‌ ‌data‌ ‌FAIR?‌ ‌

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG) is an extremely useful resource for any researchers having to comply with Open Data requirements, or simply interested in improving data management skills. As such, it is both relevant to novice and more advanced researchers. Its electronic format allows different usages: researchers can use it as training module by progressing through the chapters in a chronological manner, or by selecting a specific topic of interest. The DMEG not only helps researchers to take important decisions with respect to data management planning, but also provides essential applied guidance throughout the research life cycle, which will ultimately result in the production of high-quality FAIR data.

• How‌ ‌is‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌helping‌ ‌you‌ ‌to‌ ‌make‌ ‌your‌ ‌data‌ ‌compliant‌ ‌with‌ ‌the‌ ‌FAIR‌ ‌Data‌ ‌principles?‌ ‌

CESSDA works on clarifying and operationalizing FAIR principles so that member service providers can comply. For example, CESSDA provides the Core Metadata Model, controlled vocabularies, and harvesting so that national service providers can expose their data and metadata internationally, thus respecting the principles of findability and interoperability.

• Which‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌training‌ ‌events‌ ‌or‌ ‌resources‌ ‌do‌ ‌staff‌ ‌in‌ ‌your‌ ‌organisation‌ ‌recommend‌ ‌and‌ ‌why?‌ ‌

FORS is actively involved in the training of data management and regularly promotes the Data Management Expert Guide. It is a very complete guide which covers all the main data management topics and which can be used in different ways depending on researchers’ needs – from a short introduction to the various topics to more advanced training.

• How‌ ‌do‌ ‌you‌ ‌see‌ ‌CESSDA‌ ‌supporting‌ ‌you‌ ‌in‌ ‌2020?‌ ‌

FORS looks forward in 2020 to advancing with CESSDA partners ongoing work on providing services to academic journals though the CESSDA widening and outreach work plan project. We are looking forward to being able to make our high-visibility survey questionnaires discoverable within the CESSDA European Question Bank. Last, in preparing our re-application for CoreTrustSeal certification, we will be happy to benefit from advice and support from the CESSDA Trust Group.

Read the last article in this series about the Portuguese Archive of Social Information.

The Committee highlighted the quality of ESS surveys, the regularity of release, the ease of use of the ESS website and the number of important and innovative research projects that have made use of the data.

“We are proud to contribute to making this valuable data easily accessible and easy to use. ESS is a commitment to the social sciences in Europe over a long period of time, and which results in high-quality research,” states Vigdis N. Kvalheim, Director of NSD.

About the award

Named after the political scientists Arend Lijphart, Adam Przeworski and Sidney Verba, the award is a significant achievement for everyone involved with the ESS.

The selection committee for the award was formed of Bryan D. Jones (Chair, University of Texas at Austin), Michael Coppedge (University of Notre Dame) and Professor Pippa Norris (Harvard University).

About ESS

The European Social Survey is a large biannual survey that monitors social change in Europe. Since 2002, ESS has collected comparative data from well over 30 European countries.

Within the research community, ESS is often referred to as the gold standard for comparative surveys on attitudes towards society and politics.

The surveys are conducted by the ESS Core Scientific Team, where the CESSDA Service Providers NSD and GESIS are members, along with five other professional teams. In addition, NSD is responsible for curating, disseminating and archiving the data.

Professor Rory Fitzgerald, Director of ESS ERIC, welcomed the award and said: “The European Social Survey is delighted to win this award in recognition of the high quality and utility of ESS datasets. It is wonderful to see the ESS recognised by political scientists who are a key user group for the survey.”

More information:

ESS news announcement

European Social Survey

NSD news announcement (in Norwegian)

The CoreTrustSeal tests compliance with sixteen requirements related to organisational governance, digital object management and technical infrastructure. Together, these provide an assurance that the data provided are from a trustworthy repository. The CoreTrustSeal is the successor to the Data Seal of Approval (DSA), which was the Archive’s previous TDR accreditation.

"Achieving this accreditation demonstrates the ability of the UK Data Archive to perform all of the relevant activities relating to providing long-term access to data of value to social science researchers," said the Archive's Repository and Preservation Manager and CESSDA Trust Working Group leader, Hervé L'Hours.

Read the full news item on the UK Data Service website.

There are some brand new COVID-19 datasets in the catalogue:

• Spread of COVID-19 in Austria. PCR-tests in a representative sample (SUF edition)
• GESIS Panel Special Survey on the Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak in Germany
• Understanding Society: COVID-19 Study, 2020

Some other relevant data related to pandemics can also be found in the catalogue.

Helena Laaksonen, Director of the Finnish Social Sciences Data Archive (FSD), has been appointed as CESSDA's official COVID-19 ambassador. Laaksonen can be approached directly by CESSDA SPs and partners who wish to share information related to COVID-19 or to cooperate with CESSDA in relation to COVID-19 social science and humanties (SSH) data.

"I am pleased to take on a leading role to assure that the critical activities being carried out by CESSDA's many national Service Providers to help SSH researchers continue their work are well-known and utilised," stated Laaksonen.

"It is crucial for us that vital social research carries on despite the current situation of political and funding uncertainty," stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA. "CESSDA intends to be at the forefront of creating the Social Data component of the European COVID-19 Data Platform," Dekker added.

Find out more on our COVID-19 webpage.

NSD is a state-owned limited company under the jurisdiction of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research (Kunnskapsdepartementet). NSD’s organisational structure and affiliation are currently being assessed, as part of the Ministry’s ongoing work in reorganising the sector. NSD’s Board is currently awaiting a decision from the Ministry, expected in the autumn.

Kvalheim was previously appointed Acting Director of NSD on 15 August 2018 for a period of two years, when the previous Director, Bjørn Henrichsen, retired. At the Board meeting of 2 April 2020, NSD's Board decided to offer Kvalheim the position of Director for a fixed term of three years.

“This will give NSD a clear leadership with a strong mandate to confer the organisation stability, predictability and a clear direction for the future,” says Aasen.

“Vigdis’ expertise in data services and her commitment to the sector at an international level make her a diligent and persuasive leader. I am happy for NSD that there is continuation of leadership and look forward to continue the existing and fruitful cooperation with NSD as an important ally for CESSDA,” states Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

More information:

• NSD news story (in Norwegian)
• Photo credits: Bjarne Øymyr, NSD.

The Portuguese Archive of Social Information (APIS - Arquivo Português de Informação Social) is a scientific infrastructure for the preservation and dissemination of social science data. Based at ICS (Instituto de Ciências Sociais), University of Lisbon, the archive works towards the acquisition and sharing of digital data for the purpose of public consultation, secondary analysis and pedagogical use. The archive comprises a range of datasets provided by research projects from the national scientific community.

At a national level, APIS, together with the national node of the European Social Survey ERIC, form the Production and Archive of Social Science Data (PASSDA) which is part of the Portuguese Roadmap of Research Infrastructures, launched by the national funding agency FCT in 2015. PASSDA is responsible for the production, analysis and archiving of data provided by national and international social sciences studies.

Our role in CESSDA is to represent the Portuguese collection of research data and contribute to the discovery, as well as the reuse of social science data all over Europe. That way researchers and the scientific community can search and reuse data across borders.

• When did your country become a member?

The Portuguese Archive of Social Information (APIS) was approved as a member of CESSDA at the 2^nd General Assembly Meeting of CESSDA ERIC in 2017.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

Our contribution to CESSDA has been mainly visible in our participation in its Working Groups. APIS staff working on CESSDA outputs have attended and provided input to various CESSDA events, such as: CESSDA SaW meetings; CESSDA Metadata Office meetings and webinars; and CESSDA Trust Group workshops and meetings (some of them online).

We intend to be more actively engaged in CESSDA activities in the future and share our tools and know-how with the consortium. We will also ensure that more quality social science data and metadata are made available and accessible via the CESSDA Data Catalogue, as for the time being we only have twelve studies in the catalogue.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

Some benefits for APIS of Portugal being a CESSDA member are:

• The CESSDA Trust Working Group has supported us in developing our internal procedures by sharing practices and knowledge. Different phases from the OAIS model, such as data acquisition and ingest, would not be as well organised as they are now without the support of other archives within CESSDA. We are also working towards being able to obtain the CoreTrustSeal certification.
• APIS may hopefully also be involved in the SSHOC Dataverse project, which can bring benefits to our archive in terms of meeting the DDI standard for describing our data. We are also aiming to install Dataverse in our host institution (Instituto de Ciências Sociais) this year.
• We are able to improve our best practices in research and archiving, as well as gain increased visibility within the scientific community through cooperating with other national service providers.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

We frequently use the CESSDA Vocabulary Service for defining the metadata of studies deposited in APIS. We were involved in the translation of the controlled vocabularies to Portuguese, which will be very useful for social science researchers in Portugal and abroad. With standardised terms in metadata associated with datasets, data from studies become more interoperable and searchable.

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is particularly valuable and we organised a training workshop in our Institute in November 2019 to promote this tool. We have also participated in some train-the-trainer events and Training Group webinars and online meetings.

The CESSDA Data Catalogue is also a service that improves the visibility of our archive and means that the data from social research in Portugal is reusable across Europe.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

APIS is striving to implement the metadata required by the CESSDA Metadata Model developed within CESSDA. At APIS we support the FAIR Principles and the fact that our studies are searchable in the the CESSDA Data Catalogue means that the data is Findable.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is an essential resource for the archive and also for its researchers. APIS therefore held a training workshop dedicated to data management in November 2019. The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide helps researchers to develop their data management plans and shows them how to make their research data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). We recommend it regularly both in our institute and on our website.

• Which CESSDA training do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

In our host institution (Institute of Social Sciences), we recommend the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide. We presented this tool from CESSDA in a workshop in November 2019, as mentioned above, that focused on data management plans. The audience evaluated it as very user friendly, clear and advantageous.

We are also grateful for the fact that the Expert Guide is now available offline as are all of its individual seven chapters, as separate PDFs, as this will help trainers use these materials in their classes.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2020?

Being part of CESSDA means that we, on the one hand, get to strengthen our skills, and on the other, be better connected to ongoing developments in other European archives and in Brussels. This is of great help to us towards meeting our aim for our archive to become the reference point for researchers in the field of social sciences in Portugal.

During the course of 2020, we will benefit from support to develop our training activities and our metadata, so that we can include more of our data in the CESSDA Data Catalogue.

On 18 March, APIS attended a SSHOC webinar with other Service Providers from CESSDA entitled “Discussion meeting about requirements of CESSDA Service Providers for a Dataverse repository". CESSDA Service Providers have recently been recently discussing the adoption of SSHOC Dataverse. We hope that it can contribute to the European Open Science Cloud.

The CESSDA Trust Working Group continues to support us in our ongoing preparations for applying to the CoreTrustSeal certification. We hope to be able to submit our application this year.

Read the last article in this series about the Finnish Social Science Data Archive.

The Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) was founded in 1999. FSD operates in Tampere, Finland as an independent institute of Tampere University. We are a national resource centre and our mission is to provide a single point of access to a wide range of digital research data (from Finland and about Finland) for learning, teaching and research purposes. We aim at making both data and services FAIR, and we promote responsible open science and research. We also support research methods teaching and providing other services and resources related to data.

FSD is CESSDA's service provider in Finland. We participate actively in CESSDA, where we collaborate in several work plan projects and take on leading roles in the work of the Technical, Tools & Services and Trust Working Groups. FSD is a work package leader in two CESSDA-coordinated SSHOC project work packages and contributes to other tasks in SSHOC, TRIPLE, and a number of CESSDA's internal projects.

• When did your country become a member?

Finland became an official member of CESSDA ERIC in November 2017. However, FSD has been involved in the work of CESSDA practically from the day we started operations in 1999. Even during the preparatory phase, our director visited several CESSDA archives when envisioning our mode of operation. We hosted the CESSDA Expert Seminar back in August 2000. Check out the photos here!

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

As mentioned above, we are an active contributor to several CESSDA projects. In addition, we participate actively in communications work and other core activities of CESSDA.

FSD puts a lot of emphasis on project work and invests in the in-house training of data managers and software developers. Our strengths are especially in developing controlled vocabularies and multilingual data services, metadata management and modelling, repository certification, software engineering, anonymising research data, and processing qualitative research data. These are also the areas where we collaborate at a European level and internationally.

As one example, the Kuha2 metadata harvesting API for the CESSDA Data Catalogue is a new open source application for processing qualitative textual data at ingest phase built at FSD. It has already been put to use in three other CESSDA archives.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

CESSDA provides a network of organisations which have largely aligned aims when it comes to acquiring, curating, preserving and disseminating research data. As a national data archive, we need our European partners for achieving better results and providing better services.

Our involvement with CESSDA gives us various options to participate in pan-European projects, including the European Open Science Cloud. Harmonisation and standardisation are not possible without a well-functioning network, and they are core considerations when creating trusted and FAIR data services.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

Multilingual services are very important for the FSD. Through the CESSDA Data Catalogue, we provide information on research data available in Finland for a wider audience. All our study descriptions are available both in Finnish and English. We also translate quantitative data files into English for users who do not speak Finnish, upon request and free of charge.

We use DDI and CESSDA vocabularies both in Finnish and in English in our metadata. The CESSDA Vocabulary Service is a very handy tool for us in maintaining the Finnish versions of the vocabularies. The API provided facilitates implementing the vocabularies in our user interfaces.

FSD study descriptions in English are annotated with ELSST keywords. Users browsing the FSD data catalogue can already do thematic searches based on the ELSST keywords. We hope that at some point in the future that the CESSDA Data Catalogue will allow its users to do the same.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

FSD participates actively in pan-European efforts for making data FAIR. CESSDA facilitates both international collaboration and the benchmarking of our services. CESSDA metadata requirements, technical framework, and certification requirements are all contributors to making our services more FAIR. It is an advantage if "being FAIR" is interpreted in the same way across the SSH (Social Sciences and Humanities) data archives. CESSDA can help to achieve that.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

FSD has for a long time maintained its own Data Management Guidelines for researchers. Both our Guidelines and the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers and students to carry out responsible and meaningful research data management throughout their research projects. These guides are complementary; while our Guidelines are closely aligned with FSD's operating procedures and data types, the CESSDA guide takes a more comprehensive approach. It is an intuitive guide and there is a steady need for this type of information whether it is for researchers seeking funding, planning on depositing their data into a repository, or simply managing their research data in a sustainable manner.

• Which CESSDA training do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We have found the "train the trainers" type of training particularly useful for our IT staff. The various CESSDA and CESSDA project webinars are valuable sources of information for keeping up to date with CESSDA projects and tools. We promote CESSDA's data management and other themed webinars to our customers.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2020?

In 2020, we have two important tasks that need to be streamlined to some extent with the development of CESSDA. We are developing a new strategic plan for FSD. We are also preparing a proposal aimed at securing our position in the national Roadmap of Finnish Research Infrastructures. Both documents will be in force from 2021 to 2024.

The role of CESSDA ERIC remains central for our work in the international arena. By participating in international fora such as CESSDA, the DDI Alliance, IASSIST, and the CoreTrustSeal, FSD has the opportunity to have an impact beyond Finland. We need to continue to demonstrate the impact of our services and the advantages of CESSDA membership. To this end, the ongoing work on relevant Key Performance Indicators is essential and we look forward to using its outputs.

Read the last article in this series about PROGEDO Research Infrastructure (France).

The questionnaire is targeted at SSH researchers and academics at any stage of their careers – from Master student to full professor – who are currently working in a European country.

Click here to access the Survey.

They want to find out:

• what you need and prefer as a potential future user of the TRIPLE platform;
• more about your work practices relating to digital technologies.

This includes information on your

• use of tools for discovery used to explore, find, access and reuse material such as literature, data, projects, researchers’ profiles etc.
• use of tools for the management and retrieval of material
• use of tools for conducting research (including data collection and annotation)
• use of tools for networking with colleagues or other stakeholders
• digital literacy and general discovery practices
• hardware devices used in the research cycle

The survey is open until 30 June 2020.

It is in English and it should not take more than 10 to 15 minutes to answer the 21 questions.

Click here to access the Survey.

Find out more on the TRIPLE project website.

PROGEDO is a large research infrastructure (TGIR - Très Grande Infrastructure de Recherche) in social sciences. We are therefore France's service provider in CESSDA. We inform CESSDA about French activities and advertise CESSDA's services in France.

We organise the policy of quantitative data in the humanities and social sciences in France and work to coordinate the various actors within this sector. We represent France in three ERICs, all of which participate in the SSHOC project: CESSDA, ESS, SHARE.

• When did your country become a member?

France was one of the founding members of CESSDA AS in 2013, and has been involved since the very beginning in 1976, when CESSDA was just an informal cooperation (see History). PROGEDO became the official national service provider for France at the launch of CESSDA ERIC in 2017.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

The French organisation is original in its set-up for a number of reasons. We have a small team that documents the data. We are totally independent from the producers of official data (national statistics institute, national archives, ministries) and were are part of the Ministry of Research and Higher Education. We work with three other data disseminators: the INED (Institut National d'Études Démographiques), the Sciences Po Centre for Socio-political Data and the Centre d'Accès Sécurisé aux Données (Secure Data Access Centre).

We have also developed fifteen university data platforms throughout France, working directly with researchers within the universities.

This distributed mode of operation allows us to be as close as possible to our users, and to involve them directly in CESSDA when projects take on European dimensions (such as the EurHisFirm project at the Paris School of Economics, for example, or Sciences Po's EthMigSurvey project).

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

Being a member of CESSDA enables the sharing of good practices between service providers, with a focus on FAIR Data, and means that we are part of a network which allows us to learn about other countries' data services.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

We will integrate most of the CESSDA services in the next version of our data dissemination portal, that is to say the CESSDA Controlled Vocabulary Service, ELSST, and the CESSDA Data Catalogue. We want to offer a service that can eventually be more visible, with harmonised and translatable metadata

Our aim is that all the documentation that we produce will feed into the CESSDA Data Catalogue and the upcoming CESSDA European Question Bank.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

We are already looking at FAIR Data at PROGEDO, but by being a part of CESSDA, we can think further and integrate the practices of other member countries. We can also share more widely information about our own resources.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is a very useful resource for universities, as it supports the training of students and researchers. It is used by university research assistants and other training staff working with researchers and students using our data platforms. These experts provide support when it comes to setting up a research project, finding the right data, using that data correctly, setting up surveys and data storage. They also organise local training events.

• Which CESSDA training do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

The CoreTrustSeal certification training workshop organised by the CESSDA Trust Group and held in Paris in June 2019 was very useful. It helped us gain a better understanding of the issues and expectations of this certification. Our initial attempt in 2018 was unsuccessful as we were not properly prepared. We are currently preparing to submit a new application for the CoreTrustSeal.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2020?

The CoreTrustSeal certification is a crucial goal for us in 2020 where we welcome the support of CESSDA via its Trust Working Group. We are currently developing a DataVerse repository for managing our data and making it available. This is a mid- to long-term project, where feedback from the CESSDA community will be invaluable.

Read the last article in this series about the Danish Data Archive.

CESSDA asked Tiziana Ferrari to answer a few questions.

1. What does a typical working day look like for you?

   I typically start with some physical activity. I love running and it is easy to do when I am travelling, so I try to make time for this. I find that it helps me maintain focus and balance during my working day. I usually spend long hours in my office at the EGI Foundation at the Science Park, Amsterdam, where I enjoy teamwork. I also have a home office in my hometown in Italy, Gonzaga, a rural village in the province of Mantova, Lombardy.

   If you are wondering about Mantova, this is the town mentioned in Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, where Romeo gets locked in because of the quarantine meant to stop a Black Death pandemic. This sadly reminds me of our present times and the high death toll in my region due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

2. You are based in Amsterdam. How do you get to work (by foot, by bike, by public transport, by car)?

   I go by bike and cycling is part of the lifestyle when living Amsterdam. I cycle past Flevo Park, a heaven for wild birds.

3. What is the biggest challenge to fulfilling the EGI mission and “federating digital capabilities, resources and expertise between communities and across national boundaries”?

   The EGI Federation has been running for 15 years now. It was the first large-scale computing infrastructure demonstrating the technical viability of high-performance data sharing and processing across data centres in Europe, USA and the Asia Pacific region. Thanks to the development and deployment of high-quality middleware, the availability of large capacity network infrastructures, and the pooling of data centres across national boundaries, today we can proudly state that the EGI Federation is the largest computing infrastructure for research in the world.

   With our partners in the Asia Pacific region, Africa, China, the US, Canada and South America, we have reached an unprecedented scale. The biggest challenge today is ensuring high availability with our daily operations, while innovating services to meet new requirements from our research communities.

4. Who are your main users and what are your most popular services?

   Many research communities benefit from the advanced data analytics and simulation tools supported by the EGI Federation to scale up their in-house ICT facilities. The largest user community of EGI is made up of 15,000 users and it provides simulation tools for structural biology.

   EGI also provides tools for federated authentication, authorisation, accounting, monitoring, and support. These federating services provide a single access channel to distributed heterogeneous compute and storage facilities.

   For example, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments at CERN use the EGI Federation tools to support their world-wide computing grid, LHC is currently the research community with the most demanding data-intensive processing requirements in the EGI Federation and Europe in general.

   On an annual basis, the EGI Federation accounts for more than 5 billion computing tasks. Federated Cloud Compute is a novel platform that brings together major research clouds in Europe. It was launched in 2014 and is the service in highest demand in our service catalogue.

5. Getting researchers from all disciplines to collaborate cannot be an easy task. How do you do it?

   Thanks to the pan-European scale of EGI, we work with experts from many international research initiatives. This gives them the opportunity to reuse successfully deployed, robust technical solutions. The engagement with researchers allows us to improve and customise technical solutions to address new requirements and innovate our service portfolio.

   Many research communities are an integral part of the EGI Federation, they are funding members of the EGI Foundation, and through their participation in the EGI Council, the communities have the power to determine the EGI Federation strategy and implement it.

   In addition to this, we have many collaborations in place. We work on the co-design and innovation of services through Competence Centres, which bring together community experts, service providers and technology providers to develop and prototype new products, or extend existing technical solutions adopted by the EGI Federation.

   Competence Centres involve different technical areas, including federated AAI, federated data management and compute management. They give the opportunity to share and extend technical solutions across different scientific disciplines and are a way to ensure cross-pollination.

   For policy matters, all communities that are active users of the EGI Federation participate in the User Community Board, where strategy and policy matters are discussed. Workshops and annual conference events are also very important for us, as they are the meeting place for different research communities to come together and discuss new collaborations.

6. EGI is publicly funded and comprises hundreds of data centres and cloud providers spread across Europe and worldwide. How does your governance system reflect this breadth of interests?

   The EGI Foundation is a membership organisation, whose role is to be the federator, i.e. to provide coordination, deliver federation services, define and enforce federation-wide policies, and sustain the technical development of its solutions thanks to the annual fees of its members.

   The federation’s members are the providers in charge of funding, procurement, deployment and delivery of the federated facilities. The EGI governance relies on a clear separation of roles and service management activities among its members. The strategic objectives of the members are harmonised by the EGI Council, which is responsible for the EGI strategy. The strategy 2020-2024 was recently released and can be consulted at http://go.egi.eu/strategy.

7. Can you tell us more about your ambitions for EGI involvement in the EOSC?

   We believe that the compute infrastructure, federation services and expertise of the EGI are key assets for the EOSC, especially for the delivery of the Federating Core and the EOSC compute platform. We contribute by pooling facilities that are procured and delivered by the national and international organisations of the EGI Federation.

   We will continue to provide services to the EOSC Core, with the technical development and delivery of the EOSC Portal, the EOSC Portal AAI – for secure access to the platform, the Marketplace, as well as federated monitoring and accounting. In addition, we are committed to contributing to the definition of future EOSC operations and the technical architecture.

   EGI supports thematic services from research communities that respect the FAIR data principles and make sure that such tools, data and processing services available to accelerate science at an international scale.

   The EOSC Digital Innovation Hub, coordinated by EGI, exists to help SMEs and industry develop innovative applications and adopt EOSC services.

8. Which are your top three use cases or research stories from 2019?

   Given the current COVID-19 outbreak emergency, I would like to mention the joint support to structural biologists offered by WeNMR, EGI and the EOSC-Hub EC project through HADDOCK (High Ambiguity Driven protein-protein DOCKing). It is an integrative platform developed at Utrecht University for the modelling of biomolecular complexes. HADDOCK is also a thematic service in the European Open Science Cloud marketplace. The portal is heavily used with >15,500 registered users from >110 countries (see statistics).

   2019 was a year full of discoveries in all scientific domains supported by the EGI Federation. I would like to highlight the scientific achievements of the LIGO-VIRGO collaboration which received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the observation of gravitational waves. In April 2019, the network of gravitational-wave detectors formed by the European Advanced Virgo, in Italy, and the two Advanced LIGO, in the US, detected a signal, named GW190425. It was the second observation of a gravitational-wave signal consistent with the merger of a binary-neutron-star system. Data processing was supported by the data centres of the EGI Federation in Italy, the Netherlands, France, the UK, and Spain, for a total of 1.5 million computational tasks.

   More than 2,200 peer reviewed scientific publications were published in 2019 thanks to the federated capacity available in EGI, as reported by the OpenAIRE Monitor service. We are truly proud of this amazing result.

9. What are you most looking forward to achieving in 2020?

   I look forward to supporting the EGI Federation achieve its vision, that all researchers have seamless access to services, resources and expertise to collaborate and conduct world-class research.

   As a personal objective, I am looking forward to successfully completing the third and final year of EOSC-Hub, a project that I am supporting as coordinator. I am particularly proud of the EOSC Early Adopter Programme, started in 2019, as it has allowed us to gain insight into researchers’ needs. The programme aims to boost the adoption of EOSC services. Researchers are at the heart of the future architecture and technical developments of the EOSC.

10. If you were the President of the European Commission for one day, what would you decide?

    I would invite all children and their grandparents to come to Brussels to talk about the great peace and solidarity project called the “European Union”.

More information:

EGI Foundation

EGI Federation Strategy 2020-2024

The EGI Federated Cloud
The EGI Federated Cloud is a IaaS-type cloud, made of academic private clouds and virtualised resources and built around open standards. Its development is driven by requirements of the scientific community.

EOSC-Hub

EOSC Digital Innovation Hub

EOSC Early Adopter Programme

European Open Science Cloud marketplace

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Rory Fitzgerald

• Is your work affected by the corona crisis?
• Are precautionary measures taken at the workplace?
• Do you have to work from home?
• Has your workload increased/decreased?
• Have you lost your job/work/assignments?

First results show an enormous impact of the coronavirus on work in general. In the Netherlands for instance, a country severely hit, 95 percent of participants in the survey state that their work is impacted by the corona-crisis.

The survey contains questions about the home situation of respondents as well as about the possible manifestation of the corona disease in members of the household. Also the effect of having a pet in the house in corona-crisis times is included.

Read the full news article on the WageIndicator website.

Crucial links

For the list of participating countries, check this overview: Living and Working in Times of the Coronavirus

Find your country, do the survey and find the results!

Project page and team: Coronavirus Work & Life in Maps and Graphs - updated daily

Contact: office(at)wageindicator.org

More information

WageIndicator is part of the SSHOC project community. CLARIN - Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure, hosts the WageIndicator research infrastructure. WageInidcator is a non-profit foundation, which aims to share and compare wages and labour law on a global scale through its national websites in 140 countries with millions of web visitors. WageIndicator’s web visitors are invited to complete the survey on Living and Working in Corona Times. The survey reaches out to all people in working age, contracted, self-employed and unemployed alike.

How does the application benefit data support services?

The features of Kvalikirstu 2 include a graphical user interface for processing data and ODT file support. With Kvalikirstu 2, many of the phases of data processing, such as file conversion and categorisation of background information, can be streamlined.

“Kvalikirstu 2 allows users to make mass changes to data files. This saves a lot of time, for example, when files don’t have to be renamed one by one. The user interface is intuitive and quick to learn,” states Research Assistant Henna Räsänen.

How does the application benefit users of data?

Kvalikirstu 2 also helps secondary users of data by producing an HTML index based on the background information of the data file. The index is helpful in browsing the data, and it includes a search interface which allows secondary users to search for specific words or phrases within the data files. Data files can also be sorted according to the background information provided.

Kvalikirstu 2 has been localised into English and other translations can already be added. All documentation on the software is in English. According to the developers Lipsanen and Saaninkoski, Kvalikirstu 2 was developed with customisation in mind, and it can be easily modified to fit the needs of other CESSDA repositories (see a list of CESSDA members and partners).

“The repository-specific functionality is isolated into a plugin that is responsible for, among other things, processing metadata. Other data repositories can adapt the plugin to their needs, and the main programme can still be updated easily,” states Software Developer Jukka Lipsanen.

More information

• Kvalikirstu 2 is available on Bitbucket as open source, and it can be adapted for use in other CESSDA repositories.
• Kvalikirstu 2 source code on Bitbucket
• Information Services Specialist Jarkko Päivärinta, e-mail: firstname.surname [at] tuni.fi
• Research Assistant Henna Räsänen, e-mail: firstname.surname [at] tuni.fi
• Software Developers Jukka Lipsanen and Saara Saaninkoski developed the application. The development team received help for designing and testing the application from Research Assistant Henna Räsänen and other FSD personnel who process qualitative files.

From left to right: Research Assistant Henna Räsänen and Software Developers Jukka Lipsanen and Saara Saaninkoski.

The needs of SSH communities will shape the future development of OPERA's organisation and services.

The survey addresses:

• publishing and communicating,
• reading, writing and collaborating,
• search, access and discovery.

The survey can be found in eight different languages.

Thank you for completing the survey by 18 March 2020.

Find out more on the OPERAS website.

By following the takeover, you can:

• Discover how SSHOC is building the social sciences and humanities portion of the EOSC.
• Get links to useful SSHOC resources and insightful reports.
• Tell SSHOC which tools and resources you think should be built.
• Learn about opportunities to engage and get involved with SSHOC.

In the afternoon (12:00-15:00 CET), you can also ask expert Mari Kleemola questions about metadata interoperability. Mari is Development Manager at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), Tampere University. She has 20 years of experience in digital data preservation and open science, and her expertise areas include metadata, standards, and certification of repositories.

Currently she leads the CESSDA Tools & Services Working Group and participates in two European projects related to building EOSC: SSHOC and the EOSC Nordic project, which is coordinating EOSC relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries.

She is also a member of the CoreTrustSeal Board (together with two other staff members from CESSDA Service Providers GESIS and UK Data Service) and a member of the DDI Alliance Expert Committee.

As an author of the SSHOC deliverable Mapping (meta)data Interoperability Problems, Building the SSHOC Interoperability Hub, Mari has plenty of wisdom to share related to data discoverability and interoperability issues.

In addition to following the takeover, you can also ask questions about the project. Just use the hashtag #SSHOCLIBERTakeover.

See the news item on the SSHOC website.

Having had experience in setting up PID services at GESIS (da|ra) and LSE Library respectively. Drawing on the expertise present in the CESSDA working group, they identified a set of questions for repository managers and data stewards. These questions cover very first considerations when beginning to set up a service through to creating a PID.

The checklist begins with the basics: identifying criteria for a service and the Service Provider options available. We then move to preparations for introducing a PID system into an archive, covering the administrative and legal requirements, technical infrastructure, workflows, structure, granularity, metadata questions, and the associated policies and procedures required to answer them. The third and final section probes roles and responsibilities within the organisation for the PID service.

One lesson from our experience that we wanted to impart to users is that setting up a PID service involves a significant amount of consideration and discussion on the organisational aspects of a PID service. For example, what you want PIDs for, where you will apply them, and identifying who is responsible and how they will be maintained are all questions that must be considered before attempting to establish a service.

There are certain restrictions within which we worked. The list focuses on social science data archives, or social science related data sets in CESSDA SPs, and operates within the parameters of CESSDA’s PID Policy (Hausstein et al. 2019). This policy restricts the range of PID services CESSDA SPs can choose from to four types: Handle (and its derivative DOI - Digital Object Identifier), URN:NBN, and ARK. Although this meant we did not have to address every kind of PID in operation today, this still created a challenge in framing questions in a way that relates to PIDs but does not focus on aspects unique to one type of service.

Another challenge was to keep to a reasonable number of questions and a manageable overall length. The checklist is not intended to be used as a comprehensive and exclusive document in setting up a service, but rather to help service managers keep some focus on the broader issues and considerations in setting up a service. The final draft contains thirteen questions and is approximately 1700 words long, including supporting text.

The checklist itself was modelled on one produced by the European Commission to help manage the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation. This was a compliance checklist that took data controllers through a sequence of questions constructed around the regulation. What we found useful was that the checklist did not simply ask for a yes/no response to a question, but also provided basic information on what was needed to produce an informed response that either helped answer the question or identify an issue for which further discussion or help was required. A PID service is not a distant analogy in this sense, as both PIDs and the GDPR require consideration of current practices, organisational goals, and a review of policies and procedures.

A draft of the PID checklist was provided to CESSDA SPs, who were invited to review it and subsequently provided helpful comments to improve the clarity and specificity of the checklist. A final draft was then presented in October 2019 to the CESSDA Service Provider meeting in Bergen, where additional feedback was collected. The checklist was then approved by CESSDA ERIC and published in January 2020.

References:

CESSDA ERIC Checklist for the Usage of Persistent Identifiers. Version 1.0, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3611333CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy 2019. Principles, Recommendations and Best Practices. Version 2.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3611327

Authors:

Horton, Laurence (Faculty of Information, University of Toronto) https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2742-6434
Hausstein, Brigitte (GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Leader of the CESSDA PID Project) https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5430-8201

“2020 is a year of opportunities. Policy at the EU level is advancing rapidly as the new Commission finds its footing on several key files that will be extremely relevant for research infrastructures: Horizon Europe’s novel mission and challenge-led approach; the European Research Area’s “new narrative”; the European Open Science Cloud – just to mention some. All ERICs must work together to secure their relevance in the emerging European science landscape. The ERIC Forum is the right platform – first and foremost to evaluate how the ERIC regulation is being implemented.” - John Womersley

The Chairs are responsible for the strategic planning of the Forum, and coordinate external relations with the European Commission, the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI), and other stakeholders.

The new Chairs were elected by the ERIC Forum Assembly and will remain in office for one year.

The aim of the ERIC Forum is to advance operations of ERICs and to strategically contribute to the development of ERIC-related policies.

Read the full story on the ERIC Forum website.

Rory is also an Associate Editor of the Survey Research Methods Journal and coordinator of the recently completed SERISS project. His current research focuses on methodological challenges in online surveys.

CESSDA asked Rory Fitzgerald to answer a few questions.

1. You are the first Director of ESS ERIC. In your experience, what is the main challenge of leading a pan-European Infrastructure?

   I am the first Director of ESS ERIC but I learnt much from my predecessor Roger Jowell, who was the director prior to the ERIC being established. The main challenge of running an infrastructure like the ESS is balancing all of the various different stakeholders. It is always important to look after your immediate colleagues at the HQ as well.

2. 30 countries took part in the most recent ESS round (Round 9) in 2018/19. That’s seven more than the last round (2016/17). What explains this notable increase?

   When we became an ERIC, we lost countries due to the additional legal and financial constraints of joining a legal entity. In addition, the financial crisis hit research budgets. Thankfully, we were granted Horizon 2020 funding from the European Commission to help increase our membership after becoming an ERIC. We used Roaming Ambassadors to help reach out to academics and funders across Europe. Along with some other EC-funded activities, we have seen an increase in participation and we now have the most members of any ERIC. The more participating countries, the more comprehensive our dataset becomes.

3. You oversee the ESS National Coordinators Forum. To what extent will progress towards FAIR Data and EOSC be dependent on the choices made at a national level?

   I think projects like ESS and SHARE have been largely operating according to the FAIR principles before the acronym even existed. ESS has always made its data freely available without privileged access. Our data archive, NSD, also ensures data is well documented and easily accessible. That recipe has meant over 150,000 users have registered to use ESS data. Our National Coordinators and the Core Scientific Team are proudly committed to that agenda.

4. How can ESS data help inform and shape public debate? What channels do you use to do so?

   A recent review of non-academic impact arising from the ESS found multiple examples of how ESS data has been used to shape policy. My favourite example is how training for judges in Portugal now includes data from the ESS to show how trust in the Judiciary there compares to other countries in Europe.

   The main pathway to impact is when our academic users analyse ESS data and produce rigorous outputs that subsequently feed into policy. There are almost 4,500 published academic articles where researchers have included primary analysis of our data and many of these support existing policies or promote new ways of thinking. We also organise occasional policy seminars, most recently with the health Commissioner in Brussels.

5. You have about 150,000 registered users of the ESS data, of which nearly 70% are students. How do you grow your user base?

   Providing free and immediate access to well documented, high-quality data has meant the data has been highly attractive. Also, scholars who used ESS data in their student years and who remain in academia often use that later in their own teaching.

6. What kind of interactions do you have with the users of your data? What user services do you offer?

   Most users simply download the data and are able to use it without further support. However, the ESS HQ and the data archive both answer specific queries. We also provide guidance documents, for example on how to apply weights, and offer online training called EduNet. We also organise periodic data user conferences, the most recent one being held in Mannheim in 2019. ESS also has scientific and methods advisory boards to ensure good connections with the user community. A user bulletin is also issued a few times per year.

   All our national teams are very active in promoting the data to our users. This is mainly focused at academic and student users but also extends to those outside of academia (notably, the media, general public and policy makers). Most recently we consulted our data users directly about proposed changes to our core questionnaire through an online consultation.

7. What do you see as the main challenges and channels for introducing more people to academic research and enhancing citizen engagement?

   ESS data and findings provide an opportunity for non-academics to engage with social science. We need to develop better tools for non-academics to engage with our data such as through providing more data visualisation and simple descriptions of our data. We hope to do more of this outreach following the release of our entire Round 9 (2018/19) data set when it is published in May 2020.

8. More personally, why is your current research project important to you and what will you do next?

   Working for and then leading the ESS has been a real honour for me personally. I am passionate about measuring public opinion and behaviour to ensure that the people are heard. I am also driven to provide data to help build a more coherent and happier Europe and to ensure we are better placed to address key societal challenges. Looking ahead, I am hoping I can address the key challenge of future data collection for European research infrastructures and the possibility of launching an online survey panel for Europe (EUROPANEL).

9. What is your favourite question in the ESS?

   Do you agree or disagree that ‘Gay men and lesbians should be free to live their own life as they wish’. I’ve always wondered why the word ‘own’ is in the question! I’ve also enjoyed seeing the more positive attitudes emerging over time in most (if not all) of Europe.

10. As a member of the European Survey Research Association (ESRA), what was your highlight from the Zagreb conference last year?

    We shared the final results of our work through the SERISS project with our partners, SHARE, CESSDA, GGP, WageIndicator and ESS. It was a great event sharing some of the tools that we developed and other work with colleagues from across Europe (and beyond).

We asked Rory three extra questions relating to the political situation in the UK.

1. You recently received your Irish passport. Why did you apply for it?

   Haha well spotted (via Twitter I guess)! Like many in the UK who had the opportunity due to their heritage or other connections and saw Brexit coming it made sense to ensure I could still have free movement in the future. It was also a nice way to reconnect with my Irish heritage. Thanks grandparents!

2. How concerned are you about Brexit and what will it mean for you and your team?

   Brexit is a source of great personal and professional sadness to me. Now it is clear it will go ahead. My hope is that the UK will remain close to the EU for research, ideally being formally Associated. Both Norway and Switzerland amongst others have found ways to do this. I remain positive that a way forward can be found for the UK too.

3. If you were the UK Prime Minister for one day, what one action would you take?

   Reverse Brexit!

More information:

European Social Survey

ESS EduNet training resource

8^th ESRA Conference - Highlighting the contribution of survey research in the changing data environment, 15-19 July 2019

European Survey Research Association

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Lidia Borrell-Damian

The Danish National Archives have incorporated the Danish Data Archive into their organisation and is currently a national archive which focuses on both paper records, digital records and research data. Our role in CESSDA is to represent the Danish collection of research data and contribute to the development of tools and services for researchers all over Europe, so they can search and use data across borders.

• When did your country become a member?

The Danish Data Archive has been a member since the very beginning in 1976, when CESSDA was just an informal cooperation. Our membership continued following the organisational change from the Danish Data Archive to the Danish National Archives.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

As a national archive we have a tremendous focus on long-term preservation and can therefore share knowledge on the tools and services that we have developed to carry out these tasks. We also bring a slightly different data collection since we have the right to keep personal data and registers, and we share the metadata.

We share our training skills and communication activities with CESSDA. We have a team of dedicated employees in our Data department who are dedicated to the task of “making data findable”. We also use Facebook, LinkedIn, and host events at different universities in order to communicate. Last year we distributed over 1,500 studies thanks to the work of this dedicated team.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

We are first and foremost part of a large network working with research data, which has many benefits. We can share our knowledge on long-term preservation and at the same time get feedback on our methods and approaches. The network also offers various opportunities for employees to continue their professional development. The most tangible benefit at the moment is that our data is searchable in CESSDA Data Catalogue.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see list online)

The CESSDA Data Catalogue is a fantastic way of broadening the scope of our data collection by making it searchable across Europe with other relevant and important social science data. The size of the collection is very impressive. When we present the CESSDA Data Catalogue to researchers here in Denmark, they are always impressed with the amount of data available across Europe.

We also contributed to the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST) by making sure Danish terms are translated so researchers can look them up and compare terms across countries and find related terms etc.

The Danish National Archives are also part of the project group behind the European Question Bank and hope that a question bank across borders can benefit the research community in the future.

The CESSDA Vocabulary Service is another of our interests and we will probably use this in the future, when our new IT system is implemented.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

Making our data findable in the CESSDA Data Catalogue is certainly one of our biggest benefits according to the FAIR principles, but also simply by being part of a community of data archives where tools are built to support the FAIR principles. In this community, we share our efforts in being as FAIR as possible and support each other in specific questions or challenges.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

We consider the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide as a valuable resource for researchers who wish to enhance their professional skills in data management and increase the value of their research data. The guide gives researchers an easy, understandable and intuitive framework for conducting proper research data management in the early stages of their research project, as well as provide them with the knowledge of how to make their research data correspond with the FAIR principles.

We make sure to present the resource as a tool whenever we are out engaging with our research community.

• Which CESSDA training do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

The “Train the Trainer” events offered as part of CESSDA Training are very popular in our organisation. This is simply because their topics vary from data management, trust in digital repositories and more IT-related themes.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2020?

The Danish National Archives are going to build new IT systems this year and we are certainly going to make use of the CESSDA consortium to gain relevant advice, e.g. regarding programmes supporting our metadata standard (Data Documentation Initiative). We consider the IT developer group to be a great resource and we will make sure to consult the CESSDA Technical Working Group for inspiration and ideas.

We also hope to expand our collection in the CESSDA Data Catalogue and create more synergy between our social science data and health data collections.

Read the last article in this series about the Czech Social Science Data Archive.

Access conditions to data

Currently all the archives within CESSDA have different data access conditions. Two institutions presented their specific conditions. GESIS have several conditions depending on various factors such as the depositor agreement, confidentiality and sensitivity. The UK Data Archive have four colour coded categories, based on various factors such as the depositor agreement and how sensitive the data is – the level of personal data contained in the dataset.

Access conditions vary from country to country and the general conclusion was that the CESSDA community needs to agree on the same access conditions and make clear what the rules are to users. The CESSDA Data Access Policy states in Principle 11 that “Access conditions to data shall, by 2022, be fully interoperable.”

Metadata sharing

Metadata maintenance is the key to good data. CESSDA has now reached a stage where, as a community, we are joining forces in the tools and services we provide to our users. The first step that we took was to make sure that the metadata from the service providers were standardised and mapped in the CMM (CESSDA Metadata Model). It makes sure that sharing is possible, despite different data documentation across service providers, by making sure that they are linked to each other. The second step was to establish the CESSDA Metadata Office in 2019, which deals with metadata issues in CESSDA and is responsible for updating the CMM model when necessary.

The CESSDA Data Catalogue is the result of good metadata work by all the participating archives. It was conceived as the main interaction point between researchers and CESSDA service providers (SPs). It harvests the metadata from the CESSDA SPs and thus shows the user where the data is located.

There is obviously a lot of work being done “behind the scenes” to maintain and update the metadata collections, which also was pointed out by Jon Jonson from CLOSER.

Four CESSDA products

Four CESSDA products were presented and a dialogue took place about future development and prospects.

CESSDA Data Catalogue was launched last year and now contains over 30.000 data sets from a number of countries. There are still countries who are in the process of joining, so the number of data sets will continue to increase. The CESSDA Data Catalogue is also part of the EOSC marketplace.

CESSDA Controlled Vocabularies Service (CVS) launched in autumn this year, secures consistency in the use of controlled vocabularies across archives, and the user can see and download the definitions.

ELSST – European Language Social Science Thesaurus, is the online thesaurus showing definitions and relationships of expressions and keywords in the social science across several languages.

An example from ELSST: Relations between concepts

Copyright: UK Data Service

European Question Bank (EQB) is soon to be launched and will allow the user to search question texts across languages, countries and time. The EQB will facilitate a search possibility based on question texts from all the participating archives. This means that a researcher who is using a questionnaire can find different question formulations of the same topic. For example, say that you are studying the welfare state, it could be interesting to find out if researchers across Europe have formulated their survey questions in a similar way to you. The EQB will thus allow users to go into further detail with the data than before.

Data processing

A broad range of tools were presented, from user-orientated tools such as QAMyData from the UK Data Archive. QAMyData is soon to be released and can check the selected data and provide a workflow based on a software, thus replacing the time-intensive, manual work necessary to check data. The Danish National Archive showed how they have combined the long-term preservation of both governmental records and research data.

The Swedish National Data Service are developing new tools as a result of new demands from their designated community. SND are now receiving data from multiple communities and not only from the social sciences. They have gone to some effort to make sure to link the community-specific metadata to the DDI standard, used by the CESSDA community.

The UK Data Archive demonstrated how to use big data by scaling up for smart meter energy data. Big data from energy use can be analysed online and combined with open data from other public sectors. Speaker Darren Bell demonstrated the tool used to analyse big data online. He also pointed out that in order to use big data, it is also important to be able to link it with other data and that it can be analysed.

Why come to CESSDA Expert Seminar

CESSDA Expert Seminars are a great opportunity for CESSDA service providers to share experiences about tools and services in all phases of development.

The programme this year contained presentations from representatives from seven different countries. Many service providers were present to hear more about the tools and services provided either from CESSDA or the individual archives. One of the main benefits of being in a consortium is that it gives the archives an arena to share and discuss different topics.

CESSDA has some 20 established members and several partner countries. The partner countries have data archives that are in a start-up phase or groups who are interested in starting a data archive. The widening activities are aimed at those countries.

—What the working group did last year was, for example, to collect the resources you might need if you want to start a data archive. We also made an overview of the current state of affairs in these countries, and arranged two major meetings. This year, the working group has created a helpdesk where partners can ask questions, and initiated a mentorship programme, says Iris Alfredsson, Senior Advisor at SND and a member of the CESSDA Widening working group. (...)

The Mentorship Programme supports new data archives

In order to help new and aspiring members, the CESSDA Widening working group has started a mentorship programme. Partner organisations can apply to the programme for advice, and will then be assigned a mentor from a more experienced data archive. SND mentors North Macedonia and Italy, which means that they provide advice and support in all types of questions that can arise during the establishment of a data archive.

—It can concern everything from small to big questions. In the contacts with Italy, we have mainly dealt with the workflow and have, for example, commented on their data management handbook. With North Macedonia we have discussed various types of agreements and what competencies are needed in different areas of knowledge. Questions that have arisen for both archives are how to work in order to build networks and gain national coverage. Every time they run into a challenge, have questions or wonder about something, they can get in touch with us, says Iris Alfredsson. (...)

Read the full article on the SND website.

Find out more about CESSDA Widening Workshops.

From 2014 onwards, Lidia Borrell-Damian was Director for Research and Innovation (R&I) at EUA, where she was responsible for the overall policy development and project work related to the area.

CESSDA asked Lidia Borrell-Damian to answer a few questions.

1. What do you see as Science Europe's main role?

   Science Europe today plays a main role in “advocacy”, that is representing national research funding and research performing organisations’ views at the European level on EU research policy. It also plays a major role in fostering collaboration among Science Europe members.

2. As its new Secretary General, what are the three main priority areas that you will focus on over the coming months?

   In the coming months and together with the recently elected new Governing Board we are going to work on a new 5-year strategy for the development of Science Europe. Naturally, we will continue our efforts in advocating the views of Science Europe members in the ongoing budget negotiations on Horizon Europe and its related policies. We will also support Open Science and important, related initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud.

3. How does Science Europe view the further development of European research infrastructures, such as CESSDA?

   As the scale and complexity of research continues to increase globally, Research Infrastructures (RIs), including data infrastructures (e-infrastructures), play an increasingly important role in research and innovation advancement. Research infrastructures are effective tools for international research collaboration and are thus a priority for Science Europe.

   Science Europe is currently pairing up with the OECD Global Science Forum on optimising the use and management of national RIs. In the European context, Science Europe acknowledges that RIs, such as CESSDA, are of strategic importance in the context of the European Research Area (ERA).

4. What are key issues in the future European framework programme Horizon Europe?

   First of all, we need to make sure that the EU pledges for an ambitious budget increase. The current political stalemate around budget negotiations is far from reassuring. And so far, the ongoing discussions at the European Council are not giving away any positive clues as to whether or not the EU will commit to investing in vital sectors such as Research and Innovation. We, at Science Europe, keep reminding EU decision makers that our common future is at stake. If we want to propose a suitable legacy to the generations to come, EU Member States need to agree on a budget that is at least equivalent to what the European Parliament has asked for (i.e. of at least €120bn).

   In other words, we are stepping up our advocacy efforts so that fundamental research keeps a prominent position within Horizon Europe. This is crucial. Strong support for fundamental research is needed to keep and attract the best brains in Europe and offer them career opportunities. This will ultimately work to our benefit as citizens, in all sectors of our lives. Fundamental research is also key to developing and refining our understanding of the world around us, if we are to try and come up with solutions to current and future issues. What’s more, fundamental research paves the way for tomorrow’s innovation. This is why we ask that the European Research Council, the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (MSCA), and the Research Infrastructures be further strengthened.

   Another aspect that we highlight at Science Europe is the importance of collaborative research. Collaboration is at the core of the Framework Programme. With a view of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and boosting European competitiveness, Horizon Europe needs to stimulate collaborative efforts across all EU countries. These are perhaps two of the most important challenges that we, as Europeans, are faced with.

5. What experience do you bring with you that will help fulfil the ambitions of Science Europe in enhancing European research and innovation capacities?

   I bring with me an almost life-long career in research. After my first 13-year experience as a researcher and teacher in the university sector, I worked for two years in a company. I then went back to the university sector as research manager at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, where I initiated my career in research management and policy.

   In 2006, I joined the European University Association, where I developed internal dialogues between universities and policy advocacy to the EU institutions and research and innovation stakeholders. I believe that this combination of knowledge and acquired experience in different segments of the research and innovation system will contribute to fulfil the ambitions of Science Europe.

6. What role do national public funding agencies play in the move towards FAIR Data?

   Research data are essential for the progress of research and their impact can easily go beyond their initial purpose. FAIR data sharing and thus allowing the reuse of research data not only allows the verification of research findings. It can also help to maximise the value of the original investment as the data can prove highly valuable to support new research.

   FAIR data sharing requires good research data management (RDM) including quality assurance. Currently, there is a wide variety of RDM requirements set by funders and research performing organisations. These different requirements can cause confusion for researchers, especially when researchers are working in collaborative projects or receive funding from different sources. In order to provide more clarity and guidance for researchers, it is important to align RDM policies.

   Together with its data experts, Science Europe has developed a “Practical Guide towards the International Alignment of Research Data Management”. We encourage our member organisations, both major research funding organisations and research performing organisations, as well as other research stakeholders to base their RDM policies on this guide. Aligned data management policies across organisations in Europe is indeed one of the most important steps forward. Our members are implementing the guidelines and a report should be issued early next year.

7. How can we convince researchers to share data and implement the FAIR principles? What would be a first step?

   Open Science, in general, and FAIR data sharing, in particular, does enhance the quality of research by bringing about results that are both reproducible and accessible. But that is only possible if data are shared under the right conditions.

   In order to ensure that these conditions are met, accurate planning on how to store and share data is necessary from the beginning of a research project. The development of a sound data management plan (DMP) at an early stage is therefore essential.

   Nevertheless, still today, many researchers fail to see the advantages of data management and data sharing. They typically perceive DMP requirements more as a bureaucratic burden than a useful tool. If they are to be convinced of the benefits of FAIR data sharing, researchers need their institutions and funders to provide them with all the information and support they need to develop DMPs that will prove useful for their work.

   Open Science developments such as FAIR data sharing are time-consuming processes that carry with them a lot of challenges and a general consensus around its positive effects is yet to be achieved. Such challenges need to be addressed jointly by all actors – researchers, their institutions, and funders alike.

8. You have had an international career working in Spain, Belgium, Canada and the United States. What main differences do you see in the nature of research collaboration and networking between Europe and North America?

   There are many differences between the European and the North American way of collaborating and networking. To highlight one of these, I would say that, in general, in North America there are fewer legal constraints. In Europe, there are normally more, and they are different from country to country, or even from region to region. Despite this, researchers and people manage to collaborate in a very collegial way. I think this is an important part of the “glue” of European cooperation and development.

9. What place did you prefer to live in and why?

   I liked all of the places where I have lived. Brussels is the place where I feel I can fully develop as a professional, and best contribute to this wonderful area that I call “scholarly discovery”. In my case, it means contributing to the development of science through fostering appropriate science and research policies. I love to see how scholarly approaches enhance the value of innovation and competitiveness, and how they contribute to culture and education.

10. If you were the President of the European Commission for one day, what would you decide or implement?

    I would like to develop a series of programmes and actions aiming at developing a “negative-emissions society”. We of course need to evolve towards a sustainable “zero-emissions society” but we also need to clean the damage we have already done to planet Earth. This is essential to ensure a clean legacy to future generations. Research activity and policies must go hand in hand to achieve those goals.

More information:

Science Europe

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Bjørn Tore Kjellemo

Bjørn Kjellemo is also the Vice-Chair of CESSDA’s General Assembly, the executive authority of the consortium, which meets twice a year.

CESSDA asked Bjørn Kjellemo to answer a few questions.

1. What does a typical day look like for you at the research council?

   I would say that it looks like a typical day for a lot of people these days. Meetings and emails fill my day, but I do try to speak to colleagues within my department on a daily basis. This helps me to find out what they are struggling with and whether there are issues that we need to discuss. I also like to meet with people working in other departments or outside of the research council. I still believe in personal meetings. These meetings need not be long and formal, just a few minutes to talk face to face about what we are working on can often be enough. I believe that this is a very good way of working together, rather than shooting off emails all the time.

2. What are the three priority areas that your department focuses on?

   Our three thematic priority areas are: research on global development, research on foreign policy and international relations, and research on global health. If you look at it in a non-thematic way, we are a research funding council, so we want to run our activities in an efficient and professional way. We aim to provide professional services to our users and also to have good knowledge and analytical capacity, so that we can provide sound advice to researchers, ministries and policy makers in that area. Lastly, we want to have a close and constructive dialogue with our partners both within research communities and funders and users of research. In short, well-run programmes, analytical capacity and dialogue are focus areas for us with our current priority themes.

3. How does your department work across borders to address transnational development issues?

   We try to have a close relationship with other research funders in Europe and also outside of Europe, especially on funding research for development. We have a very good dialogue with UK Research & Innovation and also with the Dutch, the Swedish and the Swiss research councils. We have a few informal groups that meet on a regular basis both to see how we can share experiences and challenges, and to see how we can develop joint guidelines and ways of doing things. We also participate in and strongly encourage projects that seek international partnership. We have a portfolio board that oversees all of our activities and this is an international board with two or three Norwegian members and the other seven or eight are from outside of Norway. They help us make sure that issues are addressed in a transnational way. We also engage in European arenas and participate in multilateral and bilateral calls that involve countries outside of Europe, for example African countries.

4. How does the Research Council of Norway encourage the reuse of research data at an international level?

   This is something that is important to us and it goes into our Research Council’s Policy on Open Access to Research Data. The Plan S and cOAlition S which concerns open publications stirred up some debate in Norway. We are working a lot on what we call “open research”, which is not only open research publication, but also open research data and open research methods and user involvement. Only yesterday (15 October), we had a meeting with researchers from Trondheim and Bergen and talked about how we can encourage more use of data from the European Social Survey. It is always easier to have ideas about collecting new data rather than using what is already there. The sentiment from the meeting is that we feel that we can do a lot more to encourage researchers as well as young researchers and master students to use existing data. This is not only to do with the data itself, but also whether there are known accessible formats that are allowed to be used.

   We expect all projects that we fund to have a Data Management Plan (DMP). Of course some research projects do not need one and they are then required to explain this in writing. At the start of the projects we fund, we ask for a DMP as well as a final DMP at the end of project, when they deliver their final report. We also have guidelines and overarching principles of what a DMP should look like to help promote the reuse of data and openness of data. Our policy is that as a default data should be open, so you have to have a reason for not disclosing them.

5. What are the main barriers to making Norwegian research data available to foreign researchers (including for confidential data)?

   There are a number of barriers. There is a national strategy for data and open use of research data in Norway. As a small language community, one potential barrier is language. Although data does not need to be in a particular language, not mastering the language can make accessing the data problematic. In addition, there are also all of the barriers that go with data: using different formats, lacking the metadata that makes them accessible. Not all data that are collected and could be used for research are originally collected for the main purpose of research, which then means that they have not been stored or organised in a way that makes them easily accessible for researchers. A lot of the barriers that you see for foreign researchers are the same as for Norwegian researchers.

6. What is the Norwegian policy to accomplish FAIR Data?

   If you look at our guidelines in this area and for preparing DMPs, we embrace the FAIR Data principles. We support the development of research infrastructures and in that context we also underline the importance of these principles. You need to be able to find the data and access the data. A lot of these principles are reflected in our policies in this area.

7. You spent a couple of years at the Norwegian Mission to the European Union. As a Norwegian in Brussels, how quickly did you adapt to the Brussels environment (both the research and innovation world and the city itself) and which aspects did you enjoy most?

   We moved to Brussels as a family when our kids were quite small and lived there from 2006 to 2008. My oldest daughter was just starting school and my son was still in kindergarten. On a personal note, it was great to go there as a family as it was an adventure for us.

   It’s a very European capital so just as much as exploring Belgium, you explore the international community there. You meet people from all over Europe and work with them. It was easy to adapt to the Brussels was of living in such an international community. It’s fairly accessible, a good and an easy life, though there is a lot of work as well, which is very encouraging.

   What impressed me is that when you get 27 countries together, you get different cultures, languages and ways of doing things, though you are still able to work effectively. On the outside, everyone is complaining about the bureaucracy, though when you look at it in reality, I think that it is incredible what they can achieve.

   I used the train and I was also pleasantly surprised by that as well. It was fairly reliable and OK and the train stopped just near Place Schumann, which was right next to my office. I also cycled sometimes. I have not been back in over a year now. I was a member of a Council Group called the Strategic Forum for International Cooperation for a number of years and went back on a regular basis. It was always nice to feel a bit of the Brussels vibe.

8. What was the main lesson that you took away from those years at the heart of the European Union?

   One of the lessons was a personal one: to work together with people from different countries. That was both a learning experience and a great joy. Despite coming from countries with different languages, backgrounds and experiences, we are quite alike in many ways and it always strikes me that when you talk to people from all over Europe about what you find difficult or what is important in your country, it would often be the same thing. There may be a different colour to the particular issue but it would be very recognisable. When you work together you can achieve things that you wouldn’t have thought possible.

9. If you were the Minister of Education and Research, what one priority would you focus on for your term?

   That is a difficult question. Although research has been the most important area that I have worked in for the last ten years, if I were the minister for both education and research, my number one priority would be education.

   I would want to see how to improve education, not only doing better at PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), but strengthening the educational system, turning it into a system that encourages curiosity, so that no one is left behind and so that everyone feels that on their own terms, they can be a winner, that they have opportunities. This is very important in my opinion, from early childhood to higher education and adult education. Still there are too many people who feel that school was not an arena where they flourished or had an opportunity to show what they were able to do.

10. If, as a Norwegian, you could be President of the European Commission for one day, what would you decide or implement?

    Only for one day? Could we extend that to a week? One of the most important challenges for the European Union, which I think is a great project, is to strengthen inclusion, trust and cohesion. In a lot of European countries today, you see that people are losing trust in politicians. They feel that there is a divide between us and them. They lose trust in each other and they don’t feel that they are part of the same project. They feel that the EU, its institutions and politicians in different countries, have another agenda than their own. This will become a bigger problem in the future and it needs to be addressed right now. How do we build a joint project that really includes people, where they feel that what we are doing, we are doing it together? It will not be achieved in one day but just putting it on the agenda is incredibly important. We need to believe in our project and show ourselves to be trustworthy and take it more seriously than we have so far.

More information:

The Research Council of Norway

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Helene N. Andreassen

CESSDA Vocabulary Service tool now available

The CESSDA Vocabulary Service is a unique tool which enables developers to search, browse, and download controlled vocabularies in a variety of languages. The tool is also useful for researchers, for administrators and translators of controlled vocabularies, and for data repositories providing metadata.

Read the full article on the DDI Alliance website.

CESSDA Data Catalogue updated

The CESSDA Data Catalogue contains the metadata that describes the data in the holdings of CESSDA’s service providers. It is a one-stop-shop for search and discovery, enabling effective access to European social science research data. CESSDA encourages standardisation of data and metadata, and uses DDI-Lifecycle metadata as the foundation of their Core Metadata Model.

Over the past few months, work has been undertaken to improve the User Experience and the range and quality of its contents. The updated version of the catalogue went live last month.

Read the full article on the DDI Alliance website.

The consortium will work in close cooperation with other European infrastructures, in particular CLARIN, DARIAH and EGI.

A kick-off meeting will take place from 4–6 December in Paris.

Read the full story on the OPERAS website.

Read more about the TRIPLE project.

30 delegates came from universities and archives all over the continent to share knowledge and learn about issues such as:

• the conditions under which researchers access data
• the tools service providers use when curating data
• metadata – the information provided on what’s contained in datasets

Read the whole article on the UK Data Service website.

The new release sees the addition of a new language, Dutch, to the thesaurus. This brings the total number of languages in ELSST to fourteen: Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

The source language of the thesaurus, English, from which all other language versions are derived, now contains 3318 Preferred Terms. Preferred Terms represent the concepts contained in the thesaurus, arranged hierarchically into Broader Terms (BTs) and Narrower Terms (NTs). Preferred Terms may be accompanied by Use For terms, usually synonyms or near-synonyms, which guide the user to the Preferred Term, but are not used for indexing. Thesaurus concepts may also be associated with ‘scope notes’, which explain the semantic reach of the concept, and other note types, which enhance the usability of the thesaurus.

In the new release of ELSST, 98-100% of Preferred Terms have been translated into each of the other target languages, and Slovenian scope notes have been added to the thesaurus for the first time.

Content development and structural work since the last release have concentrated on streamlining the thesaurus structure, and on revision of the POLITICS hierarchy.

The following changes were made to the English source language version:

• 12 new concepts
• 7 relabelled Preferred Terms (for currency or ambiguity)
• 21 new Use For terms
• 55 new or changed Scope Notes
• 266 changes to the BT/NT relationships
• 16 deleted concepts

Other changes in the new release include the addition of a bibliography where full references for scope note sources are provided, and the explicit marking of terms in a target language that are deemed to have no translation. (This should happen only rarely, since every effort is taken to include in ELSST only concepts that are applicable to all ELSST languages).

More information:

For more information on the latest release, see a summary of changes to ELSST since the last release and read the ELSST blog post

CESSDA asked Helene N. Andreassen to answer a few questions.

1. Have you lived your whole life up here in the north of Norway? How do you handle the long nights in the winter and the long summer days?

   I grew up not far from Tromsø, and except for shorter stays in France, Switzerland and Oslo, I have always lived here in the North. I love the region and the changing seasons, and I think the best way to handle the polar night and the midnight sun is to stay outside and appreciate nature.

2. What led you to start working at the UiT library?

   More or less by coincidence, actually. I was writing my PhD thesis and didn’t have any more funding and needed to look for a job. The UiT library had an opening position as subject specialist in Linguistics and Romance languages, and I was lucky to get it!

3. When did you decide to focus your attention on research data management?

   I am a trained linguist, and have done several data collections in my own research projects. In 2013, I was invited to participate in the working group developing the Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing), which was the first archival solution for open data created at UiT. The project had a twofold objective: develop an internationally available service for researchers of linguistics, and test the Dataverse platform for the future institutional archive (UiT Open Research Data). From that moment on, developing support services for research data management was part of my work.

4. How do you engage researchers and help them realise the importance of Data Management Plans?

   We try to reach and engage researchers in many different ways. Practically, we try to reach them e.g. via open course offerings, meetings with project leaders/heads of department/vice deans, accidental meetings, emails, and social media. We also give a course with ECTS credits on doctoral level, where research data management is one important component.

   When it comes to actually engaging them in research data management and the importance of Data Management Plans, we try to motivate them by focusing on how they can benefit from having good routines, and how it might contribute to improve their research. We offer guidance when they plan to write a DMP and enter into a dialogue with them when they want to deposit data.

   We hope that allowing researchers to combine theory and best practices with discipline-specific knowledge will make it easier for them to see the relevance for their own research. Furthermore, doing most of the thinking and practical work themselves hopefully leads to a feeling of mastery, which in turn might encourage deeper engagement. We also underline the increasing requirements and expectations regarding transparency from journals, funders, and institutions, and how a DMP (and quality-assured archiving) might help them meet these.

5. What is the role of university libraries in helping researchers make their data FAIR?

   Not all libraries are in a position to develop institutional repositories and offer full-scale curation services, but everybody is in principle capable of offering some level of support services to researchers to help them make their data FAIR. If resources are scarce, libraries could read up on basic RDM and direct their researchers to good training resources online. Libraries with moderate resources could specialise in certain areas and offer courses, help researchers find suitable archives, and guide them in the development of DMPs. If resources are available, libraries could also engage in dataset curation.

   In all cases, I think libraries should enter into a dialogue with other relevant entities at the institution, e.g. the IT department and the research administration, and of course specialised RDM units if these exist. Finally, it is always useful to have contact with other libraries in the country, to share experiences and help each other get better.

6. You manage iKomp, an open and free web resource for information literacy. What is the added value of this service for researchers and students?

   We developed iKomp with a threefold purpose: to offer an introduction to information literacy to those who are not on campus, to facilitate flipped classroom teaching (by taking some of the teacher-led delivery of instruction out of the classroom and getting more time for activities and discussion), and to offer a work of reference to students when they write academic texts.

   IKomp is suitable as an obligatory assignment, and we see that gradually, more and more departments incorporate it into their first-year study programmes. Hopefully, this provides a good basis for first-year students, but it is still too early to see whether it has any long-term, solid effect. Another benefit of developing iKomp is that we have had to think hard about what we consider to be the most important aspects of information literacy, and the optimal way of teaching it to UiT students during their studies.

7. What has been your role in the RDA Linguistics Data Interest Group?

   I am one of three co-chairs (with Andrea Berez-Kroeker, U. of Hawai’i at Mānoa, and Lauren Gawne, La Trobe U.), and together we are responsible for reaching the objectives and outcomes presented in the group’s charter statement. Until now, we have primarily focused on developing principles and guidelines for citing linguistic research data, which has been done in collaboration with other members of the LDIG community. Also, we regularly host working sessions at the RDA plenary meetings, and we do outreach in the linguistic community, to make our work visible and encourage people to participate.

8. What would be the most important next step in your view towards achieving open research data?

   Getting RDM into the doctoral programmes and into supervisor guidelines. Today’s PhD students are the future teachers and researchers, and by getting them on board, we can more easily achieve a change in culture. In addition, I hope that, e.g. with institutions signing the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), datasets will be more valued as scholarly outputs in evaluation processes.

9. Can our CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide be useful as a resource in your job?

   I am convinced it will! I haven’t had that much time to look at it in detail yet, but we will definitely make use of it when we dedicate time later this autumn to further develop the content and material used in our teaching. Good, quality-assured online resources are highly welcome!

10. If you were the rector of your university for one day, what would you do?

    I would focus on getting on the agenda the importance of raising awareness of RDM and developing good routines (under guidance) as a part of doctoral education. To make the relevant parties, i.e. PhD students and supervisors, engaged, I would talk to them and invite them to discuss why and how this can be achieved.

11. You mentioned TROLLing in your presentation to CESSDA in June in Tromsø, what does this refer to? Please explain.

    The Tromsø Repository of Language and Linguistics (TROLLing) is a domain-specific archive for open linguistic data and statistical code. It is available to researchers worldwide, meaning that everyone can deposit their data, and everyone can download and reuse data that have been published. It is placed on the Dataverse Platform, which facilitates visibility, retrievability and reuse of the data. Most datasets presently published in the archive are replication data for journal publications, i.e. datasets that allow replication of the published studies, but other datasets are welcome, too.

     

More information:

UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Simon Hodson

The Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA) was established in 1998 in response to a long-term demand from Czech social science researchers. The first attempt to organise a national social data service had already been initiated in the late 1960s. Unfortunately, it failed to receive the necessary political support.

Currently CSDA serves as a national resource centre for social science research, which acquires, processes, documents, archives, and preserves digital datasets from Czech and international social research and makes these data publicly available. It is also the Czech node within the pan-European distributed research infrastructure CESSDA and the CESSDA Service Provider in the Czech Republic. CSDA is also active in the CESSDA Training Working Group.

CSDA’s objective is to develop and maintain efficient and long-term sustainable national data services fulfilling the needs of the social science research community. In line with this ambition we strive to build a modern, flexible data archive of a reasonable size, with a firm connection with our user community. We are also integrated into structures within the European Research Area and beyond.

CSDA provides technical and organisational support for large-scale research surveys in the Czech Republic, e.g. the Czech Household Panel Survey or Czech surveys under the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP). We also support the use of secondary data analysis in research by providing training courses and taking part in educational programmes in the areas of methodology and analysis of social science data. In addition, CSDA offers seminars, workshops, training and lectures and is highly active in promoting its services within the Czech social science community.

• When did your country become a member?

The Czech Republic was a founding member of CESSDA ERIC. The project of building the Czech CESSDA node started in October 2010. The Czech Republic first became a member of the CESSDA consortium in 2013 and then a member of CESSDA ERIC in 2017.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

We bring know-how from the Czech social scientific background and experience from establishing a small-scale social science data archive in a central European country.

We provide quality and valuable research data from the Czech Republic and offer the experience of skilled sociologists and researchers who have worked with social science data throughout their academic careers or/and produced data collected within their research projects.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

By being a part of CESSDA, we take advantage of having the opportunity to develop our archive, improve our services for users and data collectors and get more experience in writing training and educational materials.

We can also cooperate internationally and get much more insight into trends in data archiving. To establish contact with colleagues across many European countries and learn from their experience is the most valuable aspect of being a CESSDA member.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation?

Most of them are of interest to us, namely CESSDA Training activities, the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG), the CESSDA Question Bank, the CESSDA Data Catalogue, widening activities and some other tools and services currently being developed.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

Hopefully a lot! The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is a very handy tool that should help researchers to know how to handle their data so that they are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. If followed, researchers’ data will be FAIR.

• Which CESSDA Training activity do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We recommend the training activities around the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, which we consider to be a comprehensible and useful tool for researchers who collect their own data or/and are looking for the right data for their research. Members of our archive have been actively involved in the development of the DMEG, contributing to three of the seven chapters in DMEG (chapters 2, 3 and 7).

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2019?

We have been leading CESSDA Widening activities, as part of the annual work plan, for the last couple of years, which has been a great experience and given us a crucial role within CESSDA in its efforts to maintain and foster a network of CESSDA Partners (aspiring non-member service providers).

This year’s widening meeting will be held in Skopje, North Macedonia, on 5-6 November, and it will focus on challenges CESSDA faces to improve its research infrastructure (including integration with the European Open Science Cloud). Our Director, Jindřich Krejčí, will present our experience in building and strengthening the CESSDA network of partners.

This year, a new support service was set up, as part of CESSDA Widening activities. CESSDA now offers a specific service for data archives that are aiming to join CESSDA. This service offers personalised advice and feedback to specific questions from CESSDA Service Providers and partners. We look forward to assessing the results of this first test year and making improvements next year. The CESSDA mentoring programme also began in 2019, as a way to closely support and encourage aspiring service providers.

We are also looking forward to the CESSDA Training Days on 27-28 November, which will take place in Cologne. This will be a great opportunity to showcase our work in the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide and to help researchers benefit from its diverse training resources.

Read the last article in this series about Data Centre Serbia for Social Sciences (DCS).

Summary: initiation, planning, design, execution, monitoring, controlling and closure of internal and external CESSDA projects

Find out more.

Deadline

The closing date for applications is 14 October 2019.

This work was carried out to address the major legal and ethical challenges facing cross-national social science research, which relies on access to large-scale data on an individual level.

The guides will give researchers knowledge on how to process personal data in compliance with the law and ethical principles.

The first one, on social media and research, is the result of a collaboration between the following CESSDA service providers: NSD, UK Data Service, ADP, CSDA, GESIS, and the European Social Survey. The second one, on administrative data, was prepared by the Generations & Gender Programme (GGP) together with NSD.

A SERISS workshop being held today on “Legal and ethical issues regarding data collection from a researcher’s point of view”, organised by our Norwegian service provider NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data, will provide concrete and practical examples of collecting, reusing and sharing personal data. In addition, it will act as a forum for discussion and sharing of experiences.

The guides can be downloaded below:

Social media and research: 10 legal and ethical issues to consider

Using administrative data for research: 10 legal and ethical issues to consider

More information:

SERISS Work Package 6: New forms of data – legal, ethical and quality issues (task 6.1 & 6.2)

SERISS Work Package Deliverables

FAIRsFAIR will play a key role in the development of standards for FAIR Certification of repositories and their data holdings, contributing to policies and practices that will turn the EOSC programme into a functioning infrastructure.

Through this Open Call FAIRsFAIR seeks to support data repositories with two different initiatives:

1. Support for data repositories towards achieving CoreTrustSeal certification;
2. Support for the “FAIRification” of your repositories.

More information:

Application deadline: 30 August.

Find out more on the FAIRsFAIR website.

CESSDA Trust Working Group

“Social scientists set standards for data exchange that long preceded the FAIR Data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and developed good practices for research data management long before research funders and other organisations started to require data management plans. One of CESSDA successes of 2018 was the bringing together of expertise in this area in the form of an online expert guide for data management.” - Peter Doorn, Chair of the General Assembly and Director of DANS

The CESSDA Annual Report 2018 covers activities and results of all of our working groups (training, trust, tools and services, technical) as well as our widening activities, communications, projects, governance and management, and presents the financial information of the past year.

All of our annual reports can be consulted here.

The Data Centre Serbia for Social Sciences (DCS) is part of the scientific research infrastructure of the Republic of Serbia. DCS was formally established in March 2014 as an organisational unit of the Institute of Economic Sciences, Belgrade. Today, DCS collects and preserves data for potential secondary use - analysis for research, teaching and learning, and confirmatory analysis based on the Open Access principle.

In the future, it will also store sensitive data, which will not be available for use without proper security procedures (researcher/teacher accreditation, safe room, etc.) and user licenses according to the Personal Data Protection Law of the Republic of Serbia. DCS will also organise training for the research and teaching community, as well as roundtables and conferences.

The establishment and development of DCS were facilitated through the implementation of several international projects (FP7 SERSCIDA, H2020 CESSDA SaW, SCOPES SEEDS and RRPP Data Rescue) in the period 2012-2017. Today, it is supported directly by CESSDA ERIC, as an official Service Provider.

Our main role in CESSDA is to contribute to the European Research Infrastructure with valuable data from the social sciences in Serbia.

• When did your country become a member?

The General Assembly of CESSDA approved Serbia’s bid to become a member on 22 November 2018 and the country officially became a member of CESSDA on 1 February 2019. We are currently CESSDA’s newest member!

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

DCS a unique experience in establishing a data archive and promoting data in a small emerging market economy. We provide quality and valuable research data from Serbia. Serbia is the first country from the western and central Balkans region to join CESSDA.

This is an opportunity for us to be a potential leader in the region and a central hub for data and knowledge sharing in the social sciences. For instance, we could set up common workshops, round tables and training courses for local researchers and data professionals.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

By being a part of CESSDA, DCS has the possibility to further establish and thoroughly develop its organisational infrastructure. Also, DCS now has the opportunity to join CESSDA’s Working Groups and be involved in various international projects regarding data archiving that CESSDA is involved in. Data Centre Serbia is in the initial stages of development and is now a part of the Training Group. In the future, we would also like to be part of Trust and Tools & Services Working Groups.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation?

In this early phase of its development, our organisation is mostly interested in CESSDA Training activities and in particular the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG) and as well as in the CESSDA Capability Development Model. We have also applied for the new mentorship programme that kicked-off this year. This new programme offers one-on-one support and matches experts active in CESSDA’s widening activities with interested CESSDA partners.

• How do you benefit from being a member of the Training Group?

Being part of the Training Group gives us the opportunity to get acquainted with all the activities performed by the group. Data Centre Serbia participated in the train the trainers workshop on the DMEG held in Athens in May 2019. Based on the knowledge that our staff acquired, we are now preparing a workshop for social science researchers in Belgrade. The main goal is to introduce the scientific community in Serbia to the topics topic of storage, archiving, publishing and sharing primary data.

We will also organise a regional round table with colleagues from Croatia and North Macedonia at the beginning of December 2019.

In addition, we are translating the CESSDA Controlled Vocabulary Service tool and revising the user guide for the Metadata Office. Both of these activities are being done in the framework of the Tools & Services Working Group.

• Which CESSDA Training activity do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

We think that the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is a very valuable resource for DCS staff and also for researchers in social sciences in Serbia. We therefore attend related webinars and workshops when we can, such as the Data Discovery webinar which was held in April; in May we attended two SERISS webinars: Meeting funders’ requirements – archiving and data sharing and Finding and reusing data. As an important part of training of our staff, our manager participated in the CESSDA Training Workshop on the Data Management Expert Guide mentioned above, in order to learn how to use the developed materials in the delivery of training to their researchers.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2019?

We are hoping to receive some assistance from CESSDA so that Data Centre Serbia can become a service provider of CESSDA and thereby meet all the obligations set out in the statutes. We still need to improve our legal documents, data policies, communication channels and protocols, as well as develop our technical infrastructure.

The CESSDA Widening Group can actively help us to update our existing data policies and written protocols for data management and access and to create new ones.

We have also joined CESSDA’s brand new mentorship programme and our mentor for this year is FORS - Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, in Switzerland. In partnership with FORS, we are planning to work migrating Serbian data from FORSbase to DCS E-prints. We expect this programme to help us identify our main stakeholders and strategic partners, finalise Dataverse and our metadata schemes.

Read the last article in this series about the Belgian Social Sciences Data Archive (SODA).

He has contributed to influential reports on Current Best Practice for Research Data Management Policies and to the Science International Accord on Open Data in a Big Data World. Most recently he chaired the European Commission’s Expert Group on FAIR Data which produced the report Turning FAIR into Reality https://doi.org/10.2777/1524.

CESSDA asked Simon Hodson to answer a few questions.

1. CODATA has substantial experience in bringing together stakeholders with differing roles and perspectives - researchers, data management experts, policy leaders - to facilitate knowledge sharing between research communities and research institutions. What have been the key approaches and incentives in achieving a productive dialogue?

   We are a global organisation and the key to success is identifying activities in areas of shared interest. It is important to have a dialogue, analyse the situation and understand what the points of contact and areas for collaboration are. The varied organisations with which we work in different countries have diverse interests in what we are doing. The root approach is “to keep your ears to the ground,'' to be a listener as well as a talker, try to understand what the issues are from the perspective of the governments, the institutions or the researchers that we are engaged with.

2. If you look to Japan or Australia, do you see different topics appear than in Europe or the US?

   I think that there is a shared recognition of the need for research data stewardship. And there is a shared recognition of the need to get more results, more return on investment from scientific expenditure and in particular in relation to the data.

   What is very different is that in Japan, for example, a lot of the funding is more centralised. When a couple of years ago we did the work with the OECD on business models for data centres, there was a very big difference in the way that data repositories, data services were funded from country to country, from economic zone to economic zone. In China, Taiwan and Korea it is also mainly central funding. Their concern is that we need to have an assessment mechanism that allows us to demonstrate and allows the government funder to make the decision “is this data worth the investment?” either for the creation, or the stewardship of the data.

3. What are the next steps in the work of the European Commission FAIR Data Expert Group and what role can CESSDA play in achieving its aims and ambitions?

   The work of the Expert Group on FAIR Data as such is completed. We really put a lot of effort into our report and the feedback has been very gratifying. What we really tried to do was to create something that would be approximate to a manual and a guide that would have a validity for a few years beyond that and that people could reference and say “these are things that need to be done in the more medium- to long-term not just in the short-term.''

   So what I hope is that stakeholder organisations such as CESSDA can use it as a manual and a guide not just for engagement with EOSC but for engagement with the research data management/stewardship and Open Science space and the FAIR space more generally. We see organisations like CESSDA as fundamental building blocks for the OS and FAIR space in Europe and for the EOSC.

   What is important is that there is coordination at a European level of those entities that look after social science data in the long-term, that ensure that those data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. Organisations that keep pushing the technology and culture in relation to those data, such that we can analyse them not just by downloading datasets and putting them in our statistical software, but we can actually do data level or variable level search and integration across the sort of holdings that might be of interest in different CESSDA members, for example.

4. What are the biggest challenges to FAIR Data that need international collaboration?

   Something that always springs to mind for me is that the “F” and “A” of FAIR are a lot easier than the “I” and the “R”. Relating to “R”, I think that those research institutions and those entities looking after data in the long-term should realise that it will benefit the advancement of research if we take on board archival principles. The provenance of data needs to be understood and communicated so that it can be properly understood and reused. That covers a lot of aspects. The key aspect here is the recognition and realisation that provenance information needs to be captured effectively, automated where possible, and stored, otherwise we cannot reuse the data.

   In terms of interoperability (the “I”), although it is a well-discussed topic, it still rests with the semantics, the metadata standards, the definitions, vocabularies, and the ontologies that we use. Real concerted work on that is still necessary. It will always be necessary and on one level, isn’t this the core of what we do as scientists? If we don’t have shared definitions of the things that we are measuring, whatever they are (boiling points or chemical constitutions or the way particular social groups answer particular questions), if we do not have proper definitions about that, we can’t compare the data that has been gathered and it’s not interoperable or reusable.

5. What future business models for science publishing in the open science/open data policy framework will be needed to avoid a greater divide between researchers in the developed world and those in developing countries?

   One aspect of that is that there is a need for greater investment in an Open Science platforms and activities in the developing world and that is something I think that we are trying to do through the African Open Science Platform. We are trying to ensure that the investment (including some outside investment) is African-led and that the governance and coordination comes from Africa.

   We have a responsibility, as the global north, in that scenario as well as it is not acceptable to conduct research in the global south without having some of that investment lead to improved research infrastructure. There has to be investment in those African countries to look after the data, developing those research infrastructures and an African equivalent of CESSDA. One example of doing things the right way is the SKA example in South Africa, where in other tiers of the research infrastructure, data will be looked after in other countries. The H3Africa project (Human Hereditary & Health in Africa) and the bioinformatic wing of that project (H3Africa Bionet) is developing data stewardship capacity in a number of institutions across Africa to look after bioinformatics and human genome data and to analyse it.

6. You played a prominent role in working on the recently published Open Science Framework for South Africa. What are the next steps in taking this forward?

   The report is now with the South African Department of Science & Technology, where there is a lot activity around creating an Open Science programme. Something that is important to stress is that the African OS Platform is envisaged as a pan-African initiative, although the pilot funding comes from South Africa, this is not to be the case in the long-term. That ethos is very strong.

   Some challenges that the report uncovered which need to be addressed on a pan-African level were the balance to be struck between the open availability of data and the promotion of open innovation, while also encouraging the monetisation and exploitation of original thought.

   At the International Data Week last year in Botswana, there were 850 participants, with almost two thirds of these from Africa and half of those from Botswana and South Africa. There is a huge amount of interest. The main challenge is the investment.

7. What good practices and mechanisms for controlled sharing of sensitive and restricted data exist in the medical sciences and elsewhere that the social sciences and humanities could learn from?

   In the human and medical sciences, controlled sharing of data is obviously the way forward. There are mechanisms for doing that in a particular way, for example at ELIXIR nodes or other biomedical data archives. Of course social science data archives have long explored how to maximise data access while retaining necessary protection. I think the principle of proportionality in data protection is important also.

8. Quality control of data is both essential for the reuse of data and often a root cause of a scientist's reluctance to share their data. How do we encourage more data sharing amongst scientists within and across universities?

   Quality control is a root cause of the reluctance sometimes to use other people’s data. What one also hears in the surveys that are conducted with researchers about sharing their data is the concern that it will not be understood properly. I think there is also the fear of some research groups or individuals that when sharing the data, they will be found to have made a mistake, that they have done something wrong and that they will be caught out.

   You have to show your working, or the sources that you used or the data that you referred to and substantiate why those data are significant, why they’re a representation of a reality that is worth paying attention to and why the analysis that is conducted is valid. This is what we do. In the end, this is about research culture. Surely, we should all be more concerned about doing the work in a valid way, that can be shown to be robust, rather than be concerned that we will be caught out.

   I think that part of the issue is that people feel under pressure to publish and to publish quickly. Perhaps the knowledge that people have in their heart of hearts that they have cut corners in order to achieve that. The answer to that has to be to cultivare a scientific culture that puts more emphasis on quality than quantity.

   I come from a humanities background. I was a historian and the sort of articles or work that I used to enjoy reading the most was where the interpretation was there but also you would get immediate access to transcripts of the documents, or at least the presentation of the resources in various ways (a database, a map, the transcripts of text). I think that sort of research output is what is genuinely scholarly work and I am sure it can be translated to almost any discipline of research. For things generally to be evidence based, you have to provide access to those sources and the analysis.

   There is another discussion that could be had about what the quality of data is and it’s a number of things. FAIR helps us understand a certain aspect of quality, the epiphenomena of data, things around the data that allow the data to be FAIR (the metadata, etc.) and so we can judge that. But the quality of data properly speaking is a scientific or a research question. I think it is important to retain that distinction when we talk about the quality of data.

9. What do you see as the main challenges and channels for introducing more people to academic research and enhancing citizen engagement?

   The challenge of our time is populism and anti-intellectualism, politics that are anti-expert (for people following UK politics), and anti-science. There is a very strong anti-science current in political movements and it’s very concerning. Part of it is a resentment of intellectual activity and a resentment of the rigour that is required to communicate things based upon evidence rather than just to latch onto easy soundbites and easy prejudices.

   I think that we have to fight for enlightenment values, fundamentally scepticism (in the proper philosophical sense) about what we’re told and a demand for evidence to prove that we should believe what we are asked to believe or what people say should be believed. We have to push the agenda for what’s called “transdisciplinary research” and is actually engaging communities, stakeholders with the research that is being conducted about them and about things that matter to them (see HRI-LIRA).

   At International Data Week in 2016 in Denver, a scientist from an indigenous community on the West Coast of America, Christopher Horsethief, spoke very eloquently about the need not to ‘Other’ your subject in social sciences, not to be on the outside, but to engage them properly in the objectives and the conduct of the research. That is as good an example of transdisciplinary research as you can get. We are no longer doing nineteenth century anthropology work where the subject was very much on the other side of an observational divide.

   CODATA is part of the International Science Council, which merged the natural and physical sciences and the international social science council to form a new body. The mission statement is “science as a global public good”. This sums up in a few words I think something which is extremely important which I hope that ISC and CODATA will be fighting for over the next few years. It’s very important to make the case for science as a public good and all the ramifications that that leads to, including in relation to data.

10. If one big leap forward could be achieved now in Open Science/Open Data, what in your view should it be?

    In the end, the fundamental question here is what is the unit of production for scientific research? It shouldn’t be anymore the PDF article. It should be this agglomeration of what could be described as FAIR outputs, and it’s the interpretation of that, the presentation of that to a human audience. It’s the data, it’s the analysis and something that can be used by machines. Moving towards that as the culture of research is what is really needed.

    We need for the thing that we are measured for, the thing that advances our careers to be appropriate for research in the digital age. For it to be that rather than an article which is an analogy for paper, which you download as a PDF. For that to still be the unit of production of research, what is measured when assessing peoples’ scientific contribution and considering their careers, and therefore what people are concerned about is simply not enough anymore.

More information:
European Commission Expert Group on Turning FAIR Data into Reality (CODATA website)

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Cathrin Stöver

¹ http://www.codata.org/about-codata/our-mission

The voyage started with a Data Discovery webinar on 25 April 2019, by Johana Chylíková and Martin Vávra of the Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA). They took the international audience of doctoral students, librarians, data managers and others on a tour through the core elements of the data discovery process for secondary analysis, with specific tasks for researchers to take:

• identification of the purpose of the specific data use intended
• finding an appropriate data resource
• setting up a search query
• selecting suitable data
• evaluation of the data quality
• proper citation of data resources used.

They also explained different data access policies that repositories may have and possible related costs. Guest speaker Kristýna Bašná from the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences shared her personal experiences with discovering data in the context of her research on civic culture and democracy. For her analysis she searched for data resources with variables representing the concept of political culture. She merged data from the World Value Survey (WVS), the European Value Survey (EVS), the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and Eurobarometer.

The slides and the recording of this webinar can be revisited at any time.

A "train the trainer" workshop in Athens on 14 May 2019 took 22 participants from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Portugal, Serbia and Ukraine on a whistle-stop tour around the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG). The aim was to familiarise them with the content and resources of the guide, in particular the new materials on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Data Discovery, so that they can use this guide to deliver data training to their researchers. For this group representing various academic disciplines - computational sciences, social sciences, librarianship and linguistics - data management and data training was the common interest.

Attendees recognised the importance of researchers becoming more literate when it comes to data management. Knowledge, practices and ideas were shared and the discussions throughout the day provided CESSDA instructors with useful insights for future events. ‘The content was useful for my work/studies’ and ‘I will be able to use the presented materials to provide training within my institution’ was some of the feedback given.

The road ahead

Travel from your armchair via our series of short training videos. The brand new CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide video, released in time for IASSIST2019, shows you how to become an expert in managing your own research data using this guide as your tool. More videos will follow in the second half of the year on Data Discovery, FAIR Data and a series on “A day in the life of ….” various repository professionals. All videos will be accessible on the CESSDA Training YouTube channel.

On 27 June 2019, data protection experts from across Europe will convene virtually for a panel discussion webinar on “The GDPR and research one year on: experiences across Europe”. One year after the introduction of the GDPR, they will give their views on what changes this has brought to research, data archiving and data sharing and how researchers and institutions have implemented the GDPR. Brief presentations will be followed by an interactive panel discussion, where participants are encouraged to ask questions in advance or during the webinar. Register here.

Our experts will also share their expertise at summer school events throughout Europe, via an Open Access to Research Data course at the GESIS summer school, 1-2 August 2019, and Data Discovery sessions at the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis and the Ljubljana Doctoral Summer School at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana.

Photo credits: CESSDA

CESSDA asked Cathrin Stöver to answer a few questions.

1. For those who don’t know GÉANT: what is it and why does the research community need it?

   GÉANT delivers pan-European data-communications access for research and education. We interconnect Europe’s 40 National Research and Education Networks over a 500Gbps highly resilient pan-European backbone, providing the research and education community with seamless and dedicated connectivity to over 110 countries world-wide.

   However, connectivity is not all we do – with transmission, storage and secure access to data so vital to students and researchers, the delivery of secure AAI services has long been a priority for us. For example, many people will know us for eduroam, the secure global wi-fi roaming service, which is now available at over 100 federations world-wide. But our AAI portfolio also includes eduGAIN – a service to connect identity federations world-wide, and eduTEAMS – enabling research communities to securely access and share common resources and services. Also, our rapidly expanding cloud catalogue is delivering market-leading services tailored to the research and education community.

2. What led you to start at GÉANT back in 1997 and what is their secret for keeping you for over 20 years?

   The GÉANT organisation has existed now for about 4 years, as the result of a merger between two organisations, DANTE and TERENA, which were both created in the early 1990s to support research and education networking in Europe. In 1997, I was leaving Derby City Council after having worked there for a year and was looking for job with a European flavour to it. I very much remember my interview at DANTE in Cambridge and stating, “I have no idea what you are doing, but I am certain I can learn it.”

   Twenty-plus years on, I think the reason why I am still in the same organisation is twofold. First of all, working in GÉANT has so far never once been boring. I started out in an organisation of 12 members of staff and our network at the time (it was called TEN-34) covered 11 European countries and offered international capacity to Japan and the USA. Today, we have grown our geographic footprint to 40 European countries and interconnect with more than 80 partners world-wide. Over the many years, I led projects which connected countries in the Mediterranean, created the Latin American RedCLARA network, the UbuntuNet network in South and East Africa and today the West and Central African WACREN network. I have had the opportunity to work with partners around the world to establish NREN organisations which never becomes boring, as no two countries are ever the same and in consequence no two NRENs either. I love that we have a real community spirit in the global NREN world.

   The second reason is related to the first, but looks at it from a different angle: in DANTE and today in GÉANT, I have always been given the next challenge (my role in the European Open Science Cloud is just another great example of this) and at the same time, I have been given trust and autonomy on how to go about developing these new challenges. And that included at all times respect also for my family life, specifically when my kids (I have 18-year-old twins) were young. I am very grateful for that and try to reflect this experience on the members in my team today.

3. You travel a lot – which countries are still on your bucket-list and why?

   I have particularly fallen in love with Ecuador and Samoa and these are the two places I would like to return to, not for work, but with my family. I guess that what I like about both places is the relative remoteness – when I am in the Ecuadorian interior or standing on the beach in Samoa, I feel that I am really far away from home. It is a very physical experience. I just love it.

4. How did it all start with the UbuntuNet Alliance? What is it and what were the key factors to get this up and running?

   Since 2002, we have been receiving DEVCO funding to develop “GÉANT-like” infrastructures in the South-Mediterranean area, Latin America and Asia-Pacific region. At the WSIS in Tunis in 2005, we got together for the first time with colleagues from across the African continent, as well as DG-CNECT and started the planning for a project in Africa. As a consequence, the UbuntuNet Alliance was created by five established and emerging NRENs in the Southern and Eastern African region already in 2005.

   In Europe, it took us a little longer and we only made a concrete first step in 2009 when the European Commission supported a 12-month feasibility study towards the creation of research and education networking in the African continent. Since 2015, we have AfricaConnect2, which supports all three African regions through their regional partners: ASREN in North Africa, WACREN in West and Central Africa and the UbuntuNet Alliance in Southern and Eastern Africa. Right now, we are planning for AfricaConnect3!

   The key factor is always people. Committed and enthusiastic people, who get up and get things done and believe firmly that they can make a difference. Without these champions nothing new can ever be created. If you have a group of committed, enthusiastic believers, who in addition are ready to go and get their hands dirty and do what is necessary – my experience is that nothing can stop you. The second big factor is of course that such a group of people needs not management – they can perfectly manage themselves – but leadership and vision. I have had the pleasure to be working with great leaders – from Tusu Tusubira and Margaret Ngwira in the UbuntuNet Alliance, to Boubakar Barry in WACREN and Yousef Torman in ASREN. It is their dreams that we follow in AfricaConnect and their generosity that allows us all to thrive and learn.

5. What is EOSC?

   There is an excellent parable of the blind men and the elephant, which originated in ancient India, I believe. It is the story of a group of blind men who have never come across an elephant before and who are to describe the elephant by respectively touching one – only one – different part of the elephant. Each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body, such as the tail, the trunk, the leg. They describe the elephant based on their different experiences and of course, the descriptions are entirely different from one another.

   I think that at this point in time, we could draw a similar picture of the EOSC. I have heard the EOSC described as a repository, as the full integration of the European e-infrastructures, as a portal, as a complete disruption to how Europe does science, as a data storage facility, as Europe’s answer to the challenges posed by GAFAM, as the means to make data FAIR, etc., etc. Probably all of it is true to a certain extent.

   So, we need to ask, why are we doing this at all? The best answer to this, that I have heard, is that Europe is the largest producer of publicly-funded research data, but that this data is too often only used once.

   To improve this situation, you need to look at infrastructure and data management on a campus, national, regional, European and global level; at FAIR principles; at interoperability and standards for sharing of data across borders and disciplines. You also need to consider a European context, where many Member States have their own plans towards Open Science (and others not yet), and of the commercialisation of facilities. Above all, the crucial question is how Europe and the Member States will fund public research in the future. The complexities are quite staggering. That is why I keep saying that at this moment, for me and on a very personal level, EOSC is mainly an intellectual challenge!

6. The EOSC Executive Board has recently started its work. What do you see as the first important steps to realise the EOSC?

   The EOSC Executive Board (EB) started its work in January 2019 and up until now, we have met three times. We have a Strategic Implementation Plan and descriptions for the five initial working groups of the EB – Sustainability, Landscape, Architecture, RoP and FAIR. Karel Luyben and I as Chair and co-Chair, have also attended the EOSC Governance Board (GB) meetings, where the representatives of the European Member States and Associate States meet. We have started working with the EOSC Secretariat, which is to complement and operationalise our activities.

   So, I would say that the scene is set for constructive collaboration in the EOSC governance bodies and we hope that the working groups and also the stakeholder engagement activities will ensure the continuity of the stakeholder dialogue.

   I am a community builder and from my perspective, the first thing we need to achieve as the EOSC EB is gaining the trust in the stakeholder community and through that ensuring that we are all on board, pulling in the same direction. For that we need communication and more communication.

7. What are main barriers for realising EOSC?

   I do not think that there are barriers, but I do accept that there are challenges. One is timing, with the EOSC EB having been given two years to conclude towards the operationalisation of the EOSC into what is commonly described as the “minimum common vehicle”.

   Another challenge is the governance structure as such. EOSC projects and stakeholder activities have taken place over the past three years and now the EB and GB are parachuted into an existing picture and must lead the way! This is certainly not an ideal situation, but this is what we have and to make this a success we need the good will and willingness to collaborate across the stakeholder community, the EB, GB and the EC. There is a need for generosity and giving the “benefit of the doubt” to make this all a success, but I really do believe that we can do it.

8. If one big leap forward could be achieved now in Open Science/Open Data, what in your view should it be?

   On a political level, I would like to see our governments and ministries fully understanding that digitisation is here to stay and to recognise that Science, Research and Education is just one of the sectors to be digitised.

   But I believe that the main leap forward is in increasing efficiency and effectiveness. The Data Scientist report in 2018 stated: “Here’s what data pros know: high quantities of high-quality data are what build accurate models and inform smart decisions. And the more of it you have, the more confident your model will be.” If we want to further strengthen data quality, we will need more efficiency and more effectiveness. The EOSC together with the joint action of the scientific community and the e-infrastructures can ensure this big leap in the right direction.

9. You live in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. What means of transport do you prefer: train, bike, car?

   We sold our car immediately after our move from Madrid to Amsterdam two years ago. And what a relief it is! I commute to work in a combination of tram and metro or bike and metro, depending on the weather. As I have a little dog, a Spanish Bodeguero, I like best to walk, but Doggo is quite relaxed now in the tram, metro or train and has even learnt to sit in the bike basket - with flapping ears and looking bewildered!

10. If you were President of the European Commission for one day, what would you do?

    I would get hold of the best communicators Europe has to offer and hold as many real and virtual walk-ins across as many cities and online-channels as possible. I would dedicate that day to Europe and its institutions and most importantly show-case why Europe matters and why we need it.

    For too many years, we have allowed the narrative on Europe and the EU to be driven by those who are out to destroy it. We have to remember that destroying is easy and that building something takes time and effort. But you can only build when you communicate – we need more communication on the benefits of the EU. I very much believe that we are better together.

More information:

GÉANT Cloud Services

UbuntuNet Alliance

Previous interview: CESSDA asks ten questions to Robert-Jan Smits

If you are looking for research data up to and including the latest EU election in 2014, the CESSDA Data Catalogue, which was launched in November, is a good place to start. Apart from electoral data, you can also find e.g. election manifestos from the EU member countries from 1979–2014, European media studies from 1999, 2004, and 2009, and studies of attitudes to Brexit from 2017 and 2018.

If you search for “European parliament” + election, you will get 239 results (23 April) in the CESSDA Data Catalogue. Among the results you can find data from the Swedish National Election Studies Program, which can be ordered through SND. Some of the larger national research materials are election data from Germany (via GESIS), Finland (via FSD), and the United Kingdom (via UK Data Service). You can also access Eurobarometer data via the catalogue.

Read the whole article on the SND website.

The SODA project aims to determine the best conditions for setting up a data archive and CESSDA service provider in Belgium. The project has been ongoing for several years and it recently picked up speed as the State Archives of Belgium became its coordinating institution. Two researchers and the head of the digital archiving department at the State Archives are currently preparing the final report of the project. This report will allow decision makers to officially launch the data archive and allocate recurrent funding to support it. The project team receives advice from representatives of two research groups in the social sciences from the Université catholique de Louvain and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

As Belgium does not have a data archive yet, it cannot partake in CESSDA’s functional activities, such as feeding metadata to the CESSDA Data Catalogue. However representatives attend relevant events such as the General Assembly (GA) and the Service Providers’ Forum (SPF) whenever possible.

• When did your country become a member?

Originally, Belgium was a founding member of the consortium. However, Belgium’s contribution to the network of social science data archives was put on hold as financial support for the Belgian Archives for Social Sciences (BASS) was discontinued in 1998.

In 2010, several Belgian leading financing agencies signed the Memorandum of Understanding and Belgium became a member once again. Yet it was not until 2017 that the State Archives of Belgium took the lead. Since then the project has made strides towards completion and the final report will be delivered in November 2019, allowing for the creation of a data archive in Belgium and a true CESSDA service provider.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

Our contribution to CESSDA has been modest so far due to the fact that Belgium does not yet have a data archive yet. Researchers associated with the project have attended and provided an input to various CESSDA events, such as the CESSDA SaW meetings. One researcher from the State Archives was able to join the CESSDA Metadata Management Group (CMM) Phase 2, thanks to generous support from the CESSDA Main Office, and could participate in the group’s meetings.

We intend to contribute more actively to CESSDA projects in the future and share our tools and know-how with the consortium. We will also ensure that quality social science data and metadata will be available and accessible from the CESSDA Data Catalogue.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

Representatives of Belgium can voice their concerns, make suggestions and partake in the discussions that take place at the GA and SPF despite the lack of a data archive in Belgium. This is important for Belgium in terms of shaping the European landscape in the field. The SODA project team also enjoys access to the many ongoing online interactions between service providers via various digital platforms. We can thus see in which direction the consortium is headed and determine which areas we need to focus on to stay up to speed.

For example, as a result of the recently published Core Metadata Model, Belgium now simply needs to align itself with this metadata standard for its future data archive instead of enforcing retroactive modifications to make an already existing metadata scheme interoperable with the Core Metadata Model.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see the full list)

Belgium is a plurilingual country, with no less than three official languages (Dutch, French, and German). For this reason, the CESSDA Vocabulary Service, the ELSST Multilingual Thesaurus, and the European Question Bank are likely to prove invaluable resources for us when the Belgian data archive is launched and those tools can be integrated into its services.

The Single Sign On / Easy Access protocol will also be useful, not only as it will allow us to fulfil one of CESSDA’s obligations for data service providers, but also because it will make the researchers’ job much easier for accessing the future data archive’s online services.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

As well as being a set of rules that encourage good data management practices, the FAIR data principles are also part of the latest developments in the field of data management. They constitute an opportunity for researchers to showcase their professionalism and strengthen their applications for grants.

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide is most certainly a valuable tool in order to reach this goal besides helping researchers in making their data FAIRer.

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

Similarly to what has been described above regarding the Core Metadata Model, the fact that Belgium is a latecomer in the network of data archives means that we can now rely on the various tools which have been developed by the consortium, such as the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, the upcoming results of the Trust and Training working groups, the Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit, and so on.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2019?

As the project is drawing to an end, it is essential to make sure that information about it is widely shared to show what is to come and why it matters. This will create support and highlight the need for a data archive in Belgium. By giving us this opportunity to communicate about our project, CESSDA is already supporting the SODA project’s communication endeavours.

The State Archives are also configuring a Dataverse of their own at the moment. We hope that we will be able to draw on the results of the DataverseEU project, led by the Dutch service provider DANS.

The SODA project has already received much support in various ways from DANS as well as from other service providers. We therefore look forward to being able to repay the consortium when the Belgian service provider finally emerges.

Read the last article in this series about the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).

Data discovery is a crucial stage in the research process, especially in the social sciences and humanities as many valuable studies have originated from secondary data. Reusing data stored by archives and other data repositories is both cost-effective and a desirable research practice. However, it is sometimes difficult to find data that fit a researcher's purpose.

Speakers from the Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA), Johana Chylíková and Martin Vávra, will take participants on a tour through five core elements of the discovery process. These elements are 1) identification of the purpose of the specific data use intended, 2) finding an appropriate data resource, 3) setting up a search query, 4) selecting the data and finally 5) evaluation of the data quality.

The guest speaker, sociologist Kristýna Bašná from the Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences, will present her personal experience with discovering data in the context of her research on civic culture and democracy.

The webinar will take place on Thursday 25 April at 11.00 AM CEST. The speakers will talk for approximately half an hour and then there will be another half an hour for questions.

Please register in the CESSDA Training Calendar.

The event provided a platform for sharing experiences and knowledge gathered from working in three infrastructures delivering services to the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Presentations given by all of the infrastructures showcased the various individual approaches and challenges. Although the different consortia architectures have led to distinct developments, an unsurprising number of similarities remain. The most common one, in a practical sense, was the ongoing and often neglected need to focus on training and knowledge building.

The workshop also brought into focus the implications of software as research output. Related issues addressed were that of software publication, preservation, reusability and reproducibility.

The EURISE network created the Technical Reference as a first building block towards a common alignment of infrastructure understanding after the first workshop in 2017. It is intended as a blueprint for software engineers to use as a first point of reference when starting a development project and provides a list of practical considerations and collection of best practices to kickstart development. A lively discussion took place in Utrecht this year on how to enhance the Technical Reference. Several attendees favoured the idea of turning it into a more widely-accepted list of common base criteria. Further discussions are planned in the near future under the Network’s umbrella.

Other topics touched on during the workshop were existing frameworks to address technical requirements for participation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as well as how to build business models to ensure sustainable service operation after the initial funding phases have ended.

This was complemented by presentations from the EGI foundation on the implementation of IT service management in federated infrastructures using the FitSM standard and an introduction to the ongoing work of the WISE community on security best practices. In light of the upcoming EOSC as central point of access to digital research in the 21st century, technical alignment and interoperability will be key. Appropriately mature infrastructure operation will become a fundamental requirement faced by research infrastructures and of which they will have to provide evidence.

The two days of discussions at the workshop made clear that technical and procedural frameworks are needed as a solid foundation for the operation of research infrastructures. In this regard, the solutions and approaches presented already fulfil most immediate needs. Once they are accepted and in place, the focus must shift to the human aspect of sustainability.

Day-to-day business often focuses on creating functionality and output that is visible to the end user, while internal adherence by its staff to best practices is mostly invisible. Management structures of the research infrastructures must lay correct emphasis on internal best practice and keep staff up-do-date on procedural requirements. This can only be successful if everyone involved is aware of the difficulties and possible solutions. To this end, appropriate training material and learning opportunities are required and this will become a larger part of the EURISE Network’s activity.

About the EURISE Network:

The infrastructures CESSDA, CLARIN and DARIAH develop and provide services by and for the research community of the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. While their individual foci address different scholarly needs of the various disciplines, the underlying technological challenges of distributed digital infrastructures are very similar. The EURISE Network was established to facilitate collaboration in this area and to align technological strategies among the infrastructures and with the wider Research and Software Engineering community and their intersection in particular, https://eurise-network.github.io/.

The project is a bottom-up project that started in March 2018 and ran until the end of the year. It started with informal discussions between several universities and the Danish National Archives (DNA) and a shared view that the FAIR data principles should be addressed in a more practical way.

The group was led by the Danish National Archives (DNA) and included representatives of Aalborg University (AAU), the Royal Danish Library (KB), Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Copenhagen University (KU), and the Danish Technical University (DTU).

The project was expected to deliver material that could help researchers understand FAIR and implement changes in order to make their research more FAIR. We of course planned the usual deliveries: posters, postcards and a toolbox related to the research process. However, we also saw a need for delivering something different – something people would remember. That’s how the FAIRy tale was born, a tale that could demonstrate how to put theory into praxis. It also meant that we could show the reader, in a light-hearted way, what happens when data do not have metadata or a DOI.

The project kicked off with two days where we looked very closely into the FAIR principles and allowed ourselves to open them up, and related them to the different disciplines we represented. We often broke off into small groups, discussing small elements of the principles. At the end of these two days we realised that we wanted the project to deliver concrete material based on real life researcher problems.

All of the principles were not necessarily fully applicable to all research disciplines, and this we wanted to look into. We also wanted to make all project deliverables with the specific approach: “What’s in it for me?”. As far as we were concerned, researchers should not be imposed more work unless they can see a tangible benefit.

The deliverables of these two days were some myth buster postcards (example) and a template for interviewing researchers. We mainly wanted to find out whether they had prior knowledge about the FAIR data principles. Researchers that we would interview would have to pick a specific research project and describe where they were in the research process.

We then considered a range of problems related to their current research process and to data in general, such as:

• How data is stored
• Use (or no use) of metadata
• Change in staff
• What will happen to data when the project ends
• Etc.

All the project participants represented very different research disciplines, and it was therefore part of the project that each participant conducted several interviews with researchers representing these disciplines. My interviews reflected the researchers in touch with the Danish National Archives – social sciences data and sensitive heath data. Researchers were contacted and interviews were conducted during June 2018.

The project participants represented very different research disciplines:

• AAU: Biotechnology
• DNA: Sensitive Health Data
• DNA: Not sensitive Social Science Data
• KU: Linguistic Data
• KU/KB: Language and Literature
• DTU: Wind Energy
• CBS: Social Science
• CBS: Social Science (video data)

When the interviews were done, all the data were gathered in schemas and templates making sure that the information was comparable across disciplines and across different stages of research processes. This also revealed that the knowledge about FAIR varied across the disciplines.

Based on the data we identified the general knowledge of FAIR in the various communities. We also identified the most common problems and related these to different steps in the research process.

The next step was to present some solutions, so we could convince the researchers interviewed to be more aware and in line with the FAIR data principles. We therefore hosted a “Train-the-Trainer” arrangement, where international experts were invited to present different tools that could improve the level of compliance with the FAIR data principles. We focused on tools and services, which were then assessed according to the FAIR data principles.

After the “Train-the-Trainer” event, the project group had the tools that it needed to solve some of the problems researchers had mentioned during the first interviews. The tools were ranked and connected to different steps in the research process. This activity led to the creation of a toolbox. It allows a researcher to see specific tools that solve specific problems, and at the same time improving the “FAIRness” of the data.

The tools are classified by their availability (national or international), discipline, FAIR dimensions, phases in the research life cycle. They are then named, described and a link is provided to the tool.

The next step was to verify these and test them during a second round of interviews. We all conducted a second round of interviews with the same researchers and presented the tools mentioned before. Again we all had the same interview guide and template to record the information from these interviews. In general, the interviewed researchers were very satisfied with the toolbox. The toolbox offered them “real solutions to real problems”, when trying to improve their level of FAIRness of the data.

Data from the interviews were again mapped and compared, and the toolbox was verified so it was ready for use by researchers and others with interest in the FAIR principles.

The fairy tale was also written in this period. We were three authors behind the project, Karsten Kryger Hansen from Aalborg University, Mareike Buss from Copenhagen Business School and me. It was quite a challenge to turn all of the principles into praxis and then into a fairy tale. We could also see that the fairy tale concept was unique and could carry the whole project and our efforts therefore seemed worthwhile. The writing process was harder than expected, especially as we were located in three different regions of Denmark, but extremely rewarding in many aspects.

On 20 November 2018, the closing conference of the project took place in Copenhagen. The researchers that had been actively engaged in the project took part and shared their views about what it was like to be a part of the project and what they had learned about FAIR data. We also had a presentation from CESSDA (Ulf Jakobsson from SND) where the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide was presented (presentation).

The project really made a great impact for both the project participants and the researchers who volunteered. Valuable professional networks between data experts and researchers were created, new projects are emerging and there is much more interest in FAIR Data in the different research communities. Support from libraries, research institutions and archives for FAIR Data is higher than ever, and knowledge is definitely improving all the time. In concrete terms, the toolbox developed by the project now supports researchers and the expert community is available for giving advice.

We would like to build on this project and the knowledge and tools gathered during the process and are planning next steps. The challenge as we see it is not only promoting the use of the toolbox, it is also about changing the culture around how data is handled throughout the data life cycle.

The FAIRy tale was published in December 2018 and holding the actual FAIRy tale book in my hands was an amazing feeling. Everyone involved in the project has helped to spread the word and the FAIRy tale has definitely had the impact that we had hoped for. We have been contacted by many institutions all over Europe wishing to publish the FAIRy tale on their websites. Researchers are also very impressed – the fairy tale concept makes FAIR understandable and relatable.

More information:

• Visit the Escience vidensportal: https://vidensportal.deic.dk/en
• For specific information on FAIR data in Danish and in English.
• Download the FAIRy tale and the poster.
• Contact: Lea Sztuk Haahr, CESSDA Coordinator, The Danish National Archives, lsh@sa.dk.

The Danish CESSDA Service Provider: As a part of the Danish National Archives, we are dedicated to the dissemination of data – be it survey data or public registers – for scientific purposes.

After some struggles in the beginning, the State Archives of Belgium took over the coordination of the project in 2017, giving it a fresh start. There are now concrete results to show, such as metadata crosswalks, an overview of possibilities for the data archive’s legal form, and a scientific report on the needs of Belgian researchers in social sciences and more.

The project will end in November 2019 with the delivery of a final report on how to set up a CESSDA-compliant service provider in Belgium. This document will outline all the steps for creating a new institution with a business model, a list of recommended international standards (including the CESSDA Core Metadata Model), technical documentation on procedures and software, as well as data deposit and access agreements.

Furthermore, the State Archives are preparing an application for the CoreTrustSeal to achieve compliance with CESSDA requirements. This work is being supported by the CESSDA Trust Working Group, which offers both existing and aspiring service providers guidance and support in meeting a range of issues and standards relating to trusted data and services.

“With this roadmap the federal state, the linguistic Communities and the Regions, which all share the competence of scientific research, will be able to make a joint decision to found the data archive,” stated Aziz Naji from the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO). “This will finally enable large-scale dissemination of high quality Belgian social science research data as well as its long-term, secure preservation,” Aziz Naji added.

“CESSDA looks forward to welcoming on board our Belgian partner as one of CESSDA’s official service providers. 2020 will mark the end of the Horizon 2020 funding programme and the beginning of Horizon Europe. It is an important time for us as the social sciences and humanities to stand strong,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA.

More information:

Social Sciences Data Archive - SODA

“I am delighted to welcome Serbia to the consortium,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA. “Serbia hosted the last CESSDA Strengthening and Widening meeting last November in Belgrade, which is part of continuous efforts to broaden our reach. It is therefore great news to see such efforts rewarded,” added Ron Dekker.

DCS was formally established in 2014 by IES as a part of the national infrastructure. It has been supported by international funds through several European projects: FP7 SERSCIDA, H2020 CESSDA SaW and SCOPES SEEDS. Currently, DCS preserves and disseminates both quantitative and qualitative data through the Swiss FORS data portal SEEDSbase and via the Dataverse platform.

“Setting up a mature data archive in Serbia will ensure long-term storage of scientific data for all researchers within the field of social sciences, in accordance with the Open Science Platform, adopted by the Ministry in July last year,” stated Aleksandra Bradić-Martinović, Head of DCS and one of the delegates at the CESSDA General Assembly.

More information:

Data Centre Serbia for Social Sciences

The special feature in this chapter is the inclusion of "data stories" of real researchers who narrate the path they have walked from the initial idea to actually working with discovered data.

One story is about an economist who needs international comparative data on work orientations and explains how she discovered and accessed the data. Another story from a real researcher covers the finding of, access to and use of data for a replication study.

“We wanted the chapter to be helpful to those who need data for their research. This is why we included as many practical tips and straightforward information as we could,” said Dr. Jindřich Krejčí of the Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA), the CESSDA service provider responsible for the delivery of the Discovery chapter.

The chapter includes curated lists of different types of social science data sources in Europe and around the world. Special attention is dedicated to key European data resources for research related to ageing and its effects on individuals and society. The rich directory of international surveys will help those who look for data for comparative quantitative research.

The seventh chapter also presents a list of the most relevant data archives in Europe, that means not only the CESSDA archives but also those who have not yet entered the consortium of CESSDA service providers. A list of selected non-European archives is also available together with information about other important data repositories in Europe and across the world.

The CSDA team is currently preparing a webinar dedicated to the data discovery that will be based on the Discovery chapter. It will provide the audience with basic knowledge on data discovery and on the usage of secondary data for analysis. The webinar will most likely be held in April 2019.

Find out more

Visit the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG)

The CESSDA Expert Seminar (CES2018) took place in September last year and combined strong theoretical underpinnings with Software Carpentry-inspired practical sessions. It was a successful and well-received approach to this challenge, as was a follow-up event held in December.

Read the full story on the SSI Blog.

SSHOC is one of the five European Union H2020 Programme “INFRA-EOSC-2018” recently funded cluster projects (together with ENVRI-FAIR, PANOSC, ESCAPE, EOSC-LIFE) that will leverage and interconnect existing and new infrastructures from the SSH ERICs and foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration.

An ambitious number of 47 organisations, experienced and skilled in Social Science & Humanities Infrastructures have gathered from all over Europe to collaborate together on SSHOC, the Social Science and Humanities Open Science Cloud project, coordinated by CESSDA.

The project began in January 2019 and runs through to April 2022 with a funding support of 14.5 million euros.

Read the full story here.

Find out more about the project here.

AUSSDA - The Austrian Social Science Data Archive is a core social science research infrastructure in Austria, offering research data and archiving services. It is located at the Universities of Vienna, Graz, and Linz and is funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF).

AUSSDA is CESSDA's service provider in Austria. As an official representative, we contribute to CESSDA's bodies such as the General Assembly and the Service Provider Forum (see governance). Furthermore, we are involved in several CESSDA projects and project proposals such as DataverseEU, Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC), and several more. We also monitor CESSDA's working groups, and try to participate in most of their events.

• When did your country become a member?

Austria has been a CESSDA member since 1991¹. Between 1991 and 2013, the Wiener Institut für sozialwissenschaftliche Dokumentation und Methodik (WISDOM) represented Austria in CESSDA. AUSSDA joined CESSDA in 2016.

• What does your organisation bring to CESSDA?

We provide high quality FAIR research data that is also available through the CESSDA Data Catalogue. The research data is stored in our Dataverse, a digital repository, which several other (aspiring) service providers are considering as their main data repository. In CESSDA, we share our experience with Dataverse with other members. We also consider ourselves to be a reliable and responsible partner in the various projects that CESSDA has been planning and undertaking. As we officially launched our services at the end of 2017, our start-up phase has also served as an example for upcoming archives.

• What tangible benefits does your organisation get out of being a CESSDA member?

To name a few benefits, the other service providers in CESSDA have supported us in developing our new internal procedures by sharing their own knowledge. Our professional core processes such as data acquisition and ingest would not be as efficient as they are now without the help of the other archives within CESSDA.

By participating in CESSDA we are in the position to be a part of shaping the European Open Science Cloud, one of the most promising research infrastructures of our time. We can also substantially improve our outreach by cooperating with the other service providers in terms of communications. Thanks to CESSDA's initiative we have been able to acquire third-party funding.

• Which CESSDA tools and/or services are of interest to your organisation? (see the full list)

We frequently use the CESSDA Vocabulary Service and the European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST), a broad-based, multilingual thesaurus for the social sciences. By referring to a standardized set of standardized keywords our metadata becomes more interoperable. Among other offers, we make use of the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, participate in train-the-trainer events, and have our own national development plan and media pack.

• How does the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide help researchers to make their research data FAIR?

The CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG) is an essential resource not only to us - we use it to develop our trainings, but also directly to researchers. Many researchers have never received a proper training in data management. The DMEG helps to fill this knowledge gap by showing researchers the path on how to make their research data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

• How is CESSDA helping you to make your data compliant with the FAIR Data principles?

AUSSDA implements the metadata standard that is maintained and developed within CESSDA, and we benefit from the CESSDA Data Catalogue.

• Which CESSDA training events or resources do staff in your organisation recommend and why?

CESSDA's Data Management Expert Guide has been very valuable, because it is content rich and understandable at the same time.

• How do you see CESSDA supporting you in 2019?

CESSDA has been of tremendous help by connecting social science data archives and other relevant stakeholders from all over Europe. We hope that CESSDA will continue their work as an information hub. As CESSDA is seeking new, interesting projects we will continue our fruitful collaboration to make social science data accessible, creating opportunities for research and data reuse, and benefitting science and society.

¹ CESSDA served as an informal umbrella organisation for European national social science data archives from 1976. See the history section.

The project aims to react to changes in FSD’s operational environment as well as meet new partner and user needs. Promoting open science is a central objective of the project.

Read the full story on the FSD website.

Recently, he presented Plan S on open access to publications together with Science Europe.

CESSDA asked Robert-Jan Smits to answer a few questions.

1. What factors of your Plan S are decisive to induce a real transition?

   Researchers receiving research grants from the funders signed up to Coalition S must publish in compliant ways with Plan S. Guidance on the implementation of Plan S has also been made available. A few key elements are that authors retain copyright, there is no embargo period and the CC-BY 4.0 License is required for scholarly articles.

2. Is the two-year timeframe set by Plan S sufficient for journals to become compliant open access journals or platforms?

   There are already many compliant OA journals as listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Don’t forget that many OA initiatives have been taken over the last decades following for example the Berlin declaration in 2003. Also the fact that the European Council committed in 2016 to immediate open access by 2020 has led to new initiatives. Plan S will give a further boost to the market of OA journals and platforms.

3. What does the future financial business model for science publishing look like?

   Plan S does not advocate one specific model for OA. There are many different ways to achieve OA and we encourage innovative new models. It is for the science publishers to decide on the models.

4. a) How can we avoid a “pay-to-play” system where only the best-funded researchers and institutions can be published in the mandated journals?

   Plan S principle states: "Where OA Publication fees are charged, these will be covered by Funders or universities". It is acknowledged that all scientists should be able to publish their work open access, even if their institutions have limited means. The guidance refers to APC waivers for authors in low-income countries and discounts for authors in middle-income countries. It also recognises the importance of fee-free OA Journal and Platforms. As mentioned above, there are a variety of models that can deliver OA.

   b) Can the open-access business model create a greater divide between researchers in the developed world and those in developing countries?

   Researchers in developing countries currently have limited access to research articles due to the high subscription fees. Open access actually democratises research knowledge. In other words, if there is one group of countries that will benefit from full OA, it is developing countries. Furthermore, as stated above, the guidance foresees fee waivers for authors in low-income counties if an APC is applicable.

5. What is your take on the ethical dimension of restricting where academics can publish their scientific work?

   Plan S is built on the principle that the output of publicly funded research should no longer be locked behind expensive paywalls. Access to and the dissemination of scientific output will therefore be given an enormous boost. I would argue that it is in fact the expensive paywalls which restrict access of publicly funded knowledge to 'the happy few' which is, in my opinion, unethical (if you want to use such terminology).

   Furthermore, let’s not forget that it is absolutely normal that there are a number of conditions put on public research funds (ethics, research integrity). Research funders in Coalition S are now placing an additional condition, that research results arising from the public investment be published in ways that are compliant with Plan S. This means full and immediate open access.

6. Scientists are competitive by nature and this applies to data generated in their research. What incentives are needed to encourage more cooperation in research data-sharing amongst scientists within and across universities?

   If there is one organisation that knows how to motivate scientists and universities to share their data, it is CESSDA. If scientists see the benefit and added value of sharing data and of e-infrastructures, they will go for it. What will also help of course is that practically all funding agencies are now requiring DMPs as part of research grants delivery.

7. Quality control of data is both essential for the reuse of data and often a root cause of a scientist's reluctance to share their data. What must CESSDA do in this respect?

   Indeed, data as such are useless unless they are of high quality and FAIR. Setting quality standards and ensuring top quality data is the core business of e-infrastructures such as CESSDA.

8. EOSC is European. How could we connect with developments on other continents?

   Europe is taking the lead with the EOSC initiative. We see already that other continents are following.

9. Data is becoming the new infrastructure. Would you put the value of (big) data as an asset on the balance of your university, just like an MRI-machine, or X-ray machine?

   This is an interesting idea, although it might not be that easy to determine the exact value of data, in the same way that it is difficult to quantify in economic terms, the value of talents.

10. If you were the boss of the European Commission for one day, what would you decide or implement?

    I would go for a quick completion of the ERA and a rapid adoption of the Horizon Europe proposal.

More information:

Plan S making full and immediate Open Access a reality

CESSDA Data Catalogue

CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide

The presentation started with an overview of the EU project funding ecosystem, the current EU political agenda, research funding and Horizon 2020. Answers were provided to questions on the relevance of EU funding for Norway, how to apply for funding, which project methodology to use, what are the important questions to ask oneself when preparing a project proposal and much more. The upcoming funding programme Horizon Europe (2021-2027) was also explained in detail.

Read the full story on the PMI Norway Chapter website.

Take a look at Amir Spahic's presentation here.

More information

Project Management Institute (PMI) was established in 1969 and is today the world's leading membership organisation for project management, with more than 500,000 members in 185 countries. PMI Norway Chapter is the Norwegian local department associated with PMI.

The meeting was hosted by the Institute of Economic Sciences (IES) in Belgrade. This gave the floor to Serbia and the country was accepted as a new member by the CESSDA General Assembly in Lausanne on 22 November 2018. A number of procedural steps will follow with Serbia expected to become an official member in 2019.

“The CESSDA Widening Meeting was a great opportunity for us to welcome European archives at our institution in Belgrade,” stated Aleksandra Bradic-Martinovic of the IES. “We have been working closely with CESSDA for the last few years and we are delighted and hopeful that Serbia will become an official member as of 2019. We are at the beginning of a new chapter where we can build up our own Data Center Serbia for Social Sciences and promote our national resources for wider reuse.”

The Widening Meeting addressed building CESSDA-compliant data services, focusing on technologies, tools, standards, available resources, needs, and gaps.

In total 43 participants from 24 different European countries took part in the meeting as well as representatives of two collaborating research infrastructures, OpenAIRE and DARIAH-EU.

The meeting was comprised of presentations and panel discussions. Aleksandra Bradic-Martinovic presented her experience in establishing a national social science data service, the Serbian Data Center. Lars Kaczmirek and Veronika Heider shared their experience from the first year of operations of the newly established Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA).

Other topics addressed were the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, persistent identifier policies, OpenAIRE Guidelines, the Dataverse repository system, metadata tools, such as multilingual thesaurus ELSST and the upcoming CESSDA Controlled Vocabulary Service.

The meeting was organised by the CESSDA Widening team, made up of several CESSDA Service Providers (CSDA, ADP, DANS, FORS, SND, TARKI) as part of the annual CESSDA Work Plan. Attendees were staff from current and aspiring CESSDA Service Providers as well as Ministry representatives.

More information:

• Presentations are available here.
• Pictures available here.
• Widening of CESSDA and establishing collaborative networks among data organisations, within and beyond CESSDA membership, as well as strengthening and ensuring sustainability of these networks is among CESSDA priorities (see CESSDA Strategy 2018-2022 at www.cessda.eu).
• Past event: Continuation of CESSDA Widening in Italy (20 June 2018); CESSDA Widening Meeting presents the benefits of membership (22 June 2018)
• Data Center Serbia for Social Sciences

I started the week in Dagstuhl – Germany, with a three-day workshop on Implementing FAIR. Research Infrastructures met with Computer Scientists. We had nice results, but we needed half of the time to align our languages and terminology. On Thursday, I had the CESSDA General Assembly in Lausanne – essentially a meeting of Service Providers and Policy Officers from Ministries and Research Councils. Discussion on ‘Impact’ revealed that both groups have quite different interpretations and expectations.

Read the full blog piece on the EOSC Hub blog.

Ron Dekker is on the EOSC Executive Board and Chair of the EOSC-hub Strategy Board.

These are all excellent goals and the social science data archive community has been promoting similar ideas since at least the 1970's. We know that managing, disseminating and preserving digital data for the long term is neither simple nor straightforward. Research data will not become nor stay FAIR by magic. We need skilled people, transparent processes, interoperable technologies and collaboration to build, operate and maintain research data infrastructures.

As the Chair of the CESSDA Trust Group Herve L’Hours has written: "Technologies can be consolidated, and processes automated, but collection, creation, curation and research use/reuse of data is ultimately dependent on the domain and disciplinary expertise of the humans who know them best." (L'Hours 2018)

FSD’s work in CESSDA Trust Group and CoreTrustSeal are supported by CESSDA Trust Work Plan project and the Active FSD for CESSDA project funded by the Academy of Finland.

Read the full blog piece here.

More information:

World Digital Preservation Day

Finnish Social Science Data Archive - FSD

Promoting our tools & services and aligning with EOSC

The social sciences cover multiple disciplines and many communities, studying human behaviour and decision-making, interactions in societies and organisations, development levels, governance, politics and much more. In a way, social sciences is about us and the people are our data.

CESSDA develops tools & services for researchers – either as data producers or as data users. We want to coordinate standards for metadata, provide a technology platform – together with other research infrastructures. We also want to be renowned for our training on data management and data discovery & use. CESSDA is dedicated to building quality and trust in the data ecosystem, not least via the certification of our data service providers and by working on the quality of the data.

“CESSDA intends to play a significant role in shaping the European Open Science Cloud Portal, which is being defined later this month in Vienna,” stated Ron Dekker, CESSDA Director. “As a consortium of trusted repositories with European coverage and thanks to our broad offer of tools and services, we can help researchers reap the full benefits of data-driven science,” Ron Dekker said.

Listening to our CESSDA community

We mapped the needs of all our stakeholders: data users, data providers, service providers and members and crossed checked them with our tools and services.

For Data Users, we offer the CESSDA Data Catalogue, a platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data.

For Data Producers, we have an up-to-date Data Management Expert Guide, designed by European experts to help social science researchers make their research data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable.

We also have a Training portal where offer training activities, advice and educational resources. Do you want to become a well-trained researcher in data management and data use? Look for a suitable date and training session in our Training Event Calendar.

For Service Providers, we also offer back-office tools, such as a Controlled Vocabularies Manager (coming soon), a Capability Development Model which provides both a starting point for emerging preservation initiatives and a reference tool for established archives. We also have a Cost-Benefit Advocacy Toolkit to support funding and business cases.

For Members and potential members, we have a Guide for Developing National Data Service Plans and best practices from Service Providers.

What’s in store for the coming months?

CESSDA will be delivering additional user-orientated tools and services in the coming 24 months, as we align with EOSC and comply with the FAIR Data principles,.

Over to you now

Browse the new CESSDA website and keep an eye out for our upcoming new services on Twitter @CESSDA_Data and LinkedIn.

The Technical Officer provides a highly productive development, test and production environment as well as maintaining, supporting and documenting the IT-infrastructure for CESSDA.

Download the job ad here (pdf), or see it on LinkedIn.

Deadline

The closing date for applications is 30 November 2018.

CES2018 took place on 26 September 2018 at the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives - ADP in Ljubljana. It was led by the CESSDA Technical Working Group.

John Shepherdson, CESSDA Platform Delivery Director and leader of the CESSDA Technical Working Group chaired the seminar and stated that:

“Significant progress has been achieved since the last meeting two years ago. This has enabled social science data archives across Europe to develop and deliver high quality tools and services to run on the CESSDA technical infrastructure.”

Two years on, CESSDA has:

• Set up a sophisticated development and test environment (based on Bitbucket, Jenkins, Selenium and SonarQube) that is available to all service providers;
• Extended its set of procedures and guidance documents, that tell software developers how to design and deploy tools and services for CESSDA;
• Improved the reproducibility, reliability and scalability of the components that form part of the tools and services, by adopting containerisation (Docker) and clustering (Kubernetes) technologies;
• Developed a number of tools that will be soon made available to the European social science research community (including a CESSDA Data Catalogue and Vocabularies Manager).

Attendees of the seminar were CESSDA Service Provider staff working on the implementation of CESSDA Tools and Services and of their own back office systems.

More information:

Presentations available here.

Pictures available here.

Past event - CES2016: Vision on! CESSDA’s Expert Seminar shows the way (CESSDA news); CESSDA leading the way on technical infrastructure (UK Data Service news)

The project is coordinated by the Social Data Bank of EKKE and it will receive 1 million EUR for the next three years (running from September 2018 to October 2021).

The main objectives are for So.Da.Net to:

• Be compatible with the technology and procedures of CESSDA ERIC;
• Operate as Register of Empirical Research and Data Sets as well as National Depository of Social Data;
• Be established and operate with the support of a network of research institutions and a grid of research infrastructures;
• Systematically support interdisciplinary research in the area of research infrastructures with an emphasis on knowledge management, language and data;
• Conduct surveys through CAI systems for the needs of the scientific community and/or third parties; and finally
• Create an E-learning environment and digital content for training and educational purposes.

EKKE also joined another research infrastructure this summer, CLARIN (European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology). Clarin:el organised a workshop on Language Data and Technologies in Social and Political Sciences specifically targeted at its newest institutional repositories, namely the National Center for Social Research (EKKE) and the Panteion University, both members of SoDaNet.

The workshop took place on 27 June 2018 and attracted researchers from the National Centre for Social Research (EKKE), the Service Provider of SoDaNet to CESSDA ERIC, as well as academics and post doctorals students of the Panteion university (also a member of Sodanet).

More information:

"Language Data and Technologies in Social and Political Sciences" Workshop on 27 June 2018

Video on Clarin:el

Greek Service Provider of CESSDA: So.Da.Net

1) What would be the top three benefits for you of joining CESSDA?

Becoming a member of CESSDA will allow us to:

• be part of a European research infrastructure, strengthening relationships with other European partners and facilitating the exchange and use of data at a European level;
• share and spread best practices in data archiving, improve our knowledge and skills in data curation and data preservation;
• build a national academic network in the social science and humanities (SSH) field in order to disseminate research data and promote secondary analysis following the FAIR principles.

2) What do you think of the upcoming CESSDA Data Catalogue? Will it make research in the social sciences more efficient?

The CESSDA Data Catalogue is a very important resource since it applies the FAIR principles to research data.

It brings together the different catalogues published by the national service providers making data:

• more findable: it makes it possible to find the desired data in a very fast and easy way at a European level;
• more visible: data are directly linked to the national service provider that preserve them and with upfront information on access conditions;
• more comparable: it is based on a structured and widespread metadata scheme which enables the finding of comparable data.

At UniData, we think that the CESSDA Data Catalogue will certainly make research more efficient in the SSH field.

More information:

Strengthening and widening, Belgrade - 14-15 November 2018

CESSDA interviews ESFRI Chair Jan Hrušák (12 October)

CESSDA addresses potential member countries during a two-day event in Milan (5 June)

ESFRI Roadmap 2018

What would be your number one recommendation for CESSDA in terms of long-term sustainability and in terms of impact?

Being an ESFRI research infrastructure several of the recommendations drafted in the ESFRI Long Term Sustainability report are relevant for CESSDA. I would probably stress the issue of integration. It seems of vital importance, given the broadly distributed character and the societal importance of CESSDA.

CESSDA needs to gain greater visibility and all European countries should become members of CESSDA ERIC.

A further important step for ensuring long-term sustainability is for CESSDA to develop a stronger internal organisational structure, to help protect from local fluctuations.

The reason for this is that as a distributed research infrastructure, CESSDA faces the challenge of dealing with different funding regimes and cycles as well as different decision-making processes. It is therefore of prior importance to have a contingency strategy with sufficient funding from the central management structure, in case of budget volatility in the member countries.

In terms of impact, CESSDA should continue its efforts in setting standards and promoting best practices in data management.

As our society becomes more and more data driven, it is of uttermost importance that the datasets are not only well organised, interconnected, and preserved, i.e. treated in accordance with the FAIR principles, but on top of that, that the ethical dimension and data integrity dimensions are adequately considered.

CESSDA has developed a deep understanding of these issues, and it has the potential to be one of the major players in the European Open Science Agenda.

In your view, how can CESSDA help strengthen and consolidate the European Research Infrastructure ecosystem?

Research data are the primary output of all the research infrastructures irrespectively of the scientific field. The primary explorations of these data are perfectly well understood and maintained by their original producers i.e. the scientists working in the domain.

However, these “usual practices” quickly reach their limit when it comes to transversal data processing, to interoperability or to operations on aggregated data sets across different scientific domains.

The understanding and experience gathered by CESSDA on data management and on storage, is of vital importance for all the other research infrastructures irrespectively of their scientific domain.

Spreading this knowledge and sharing both experience and best practices would be a great contribution to the integration of the European landscape of Research Infrastructures, and could be included in the CESSDA mission.

More information:

Strengthening and widening, Belgrade - 14-15 November 2018
CESSDA addresses potential member countries during a two-day event in Milan (5 June)
ESFRI Roadmap 2018

• 49 new concepts
• 54 new Use For terms
• 39 relabelled Preferred Terms (for currency or ambiguity)
• 164 changes to the BT/NT relationships
• 22 new or changed Scope Notes
• 55 deleted concepts

The translation of Preferred Terms for the following languages is 98-100% complete: Czech, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Romanian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

Since the previous release in September 2017 we have continued our restructuring work, focusing on the following hierarchies:

• WELL-BEING (SOCIETY)
• LAW AND JUSTICE
• ENERGY
• SPORT
• SAFETY AND SECURITY

In each case, we tried to reduce the number of top terms (i.e. terms with no Broader Term) and orphan terms (i.e. terms with no Broader or Narrower Term), in order to make the thesaurus easier to browse. The removal of orphan terms will also make the thesaurus more SKOS-compliant.

We also reduced the number of polyhierarchies wherever possible (this work is ongoing), and applied the Related Term (RT) constraint rule that forbids an RT to be a term’s BT/NT or appear anywhere in its hierarchical structure. Many terms that were previously RTs can now be found by expanding a term’s Tree view.

Work on redistributing the information that was previously contained in scope notes into the new note fields (i.e. Scope note, Scope note source, Use note and History note) was completed for the source language. At the same time, ELSST and HASSET were brought closer into alignment by making their scope notes identical. Thus ELSST concepts that are shared with HASSET (identified as ‘core’ in the thesaurus), now share their Preferred Term label, Broader Terms and Scope Note with HASSET.

The redistribution of scope notes into the new note fields in the target languages is still ongoing.

Further information on the new changes can be found at Changes to ELSST.

Lorna Balkan

In recent years, ELSST has benefited from two strands of funding. Development work on the thesaurus content and software has been funded by the ESRC-funded CESSDA-ELSST project, and continues under the EU-funded CESSDA Vocabulary Services Multilingual Content Management (CESSDA VOICE) project. Complementary work on the assessment of the translation quality of terms has been carried out as part of the Synergies for Europe’s Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences (SERISS) project, which is also funded by the EU. The SERISS work has now been completed.

The SERISS project investigated two methods for assessing the translation quality of ELSST terms. The first method was back-translation, which was performed on a subset of ELSST terms in two of the target languages: French and German. The work was very labour-intensive, but helped to identify cases where translations differed semantically and stylistically from the source terms. This was reported previously (see the First results of SERISS project).

The second quality assessment method, discussed here, involved comparing the set of index terms assigned to the same resource in different languages. Two types of resource were chosen: whole studies versus individual questions.

Whole-study indexing

For the whole-study indexing, a comparison was made of the ELSST terms used to index the same set of cross-national surveys in different languages. The indexing had been carried out previously by members of Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) or CESSDA-related archives, according to their own indexing procedures. These procedures differed widely, with some archives assigning index terms at more granular levels than others. Consequently the results, discussed in First results of SERISS project, were difficult to compare. Moreover, whole study indexing produces an alphabetic list of terms where it is difficult to see which term relates to which part of a study.

Question indexing

Indexing individual questions is not currently practised by any of the CESSDA and CESSDA-related archives, but a small sample was selected and indexed as part of the SERISS project. The questions were taken from three surveys (the European Social Survey (ESS), the European Values Study (EVS) and the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE)), and indexed with ELSST terms in German, Greek and Romanian. As before, the results were analysed, not only to compare how consistent the indexing was between indexers (and thereby uncover any potential problems with the terms or their translations), but also to see how well they covered the semantic content expressed in the questions.

This time, it was easier to see how the terms related to the object indexed (i.e. the question text) and to identify problems such as ambiguity (where a term’s meaning was not clear in the source and/or target language) and redundancy (where there was too great an overlap of meaning between two or more terms in the same language). However, other factors besides the properties of the terms themselves influenced the indexers’ choice of terms. In some cases, differences in how questions were worded in the different languages had an impact on the indexing terms chosen, and despite the fact that all indexers were using the same indexing instructions, each indexer interpreted them slightly differently. The experiment also revealed cases where the semantic content of the questions could not be adequately covered by ELSST terms, resulting in some new term suggestions. More details can be found in the Report on application of indexing terms in the data lifecycle.

Project impact

Overall, the SERISS work proved valuable in highlighting issues with ELSST terms and their translations. These issues cover semantic as well as more formal/stylistic aspects of terms. The results have been used to produce Guidelines for the management of ELSST content, which in turn has been used to update ELSST translation guidelines and training, and inform ongoing thesaurus development and translation work.

Besides improving the translation quality of ELSST terms, the SERISS work will also be of interest to those investigating how to index data, i.e. what to index (whole studies, questions and/or variables) and where in the data lifecycle indexing should be carried out.

Results from the SERISS thesaurus evaluation

• Report on findings from re-translation of ELSST terms and their use in the CESSDA Portal
• Guidelines for the management of ELSST content
• Report on application of indexing terms in the data lifecycle

Lorna Balkan

Henrichsen has played a crucial role for social science and research infrastructures in Norway and in Europe. He chaired Social Sciences and Humanities in the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) for six years and has been the Norwegian delegate to ESFRI since 2004. He received a knighthood of the first class of St. Olav for his work for society and together with NSD received the EU’s Descartes Award in 2005 for efforts setting up the European Social Survey (ESS). Until recently, he was chair of the Board of Directors of CESSDA AS.

"Bjørn Henrichsen has been a strong and effective advocate for the building of European research infrastructures in the social sciences for many years, and the establishment of CESSDA as an ERIC stands as a testimony to his achievements," stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

Vigdis Kvalheim, currently Deputy Director, has been appointed as the new Director. She has been at NSD for many years and leads the Data Protection Services and the Individual Level Data Unit. Kvalheim is also actively involved in infrastructure activities on Nordic and European levels.

“I look forward to this great opportunity to steer NSD through a decisive time in its history. We will continue to work closely with our national and European colleagues over the coming period to ensure the best outcome for social science researchers in Norway and abroad. I am grateful for the highly-skilled staff that we have at NSD and look forward to working with them,” stated Vigdis Kvalheim.

More information:

• NSD news story (in Norwegian)
• Photo credits: Bjarne Øymyr, NSD.

Addressing core topics of interest to data professionals, CESSDA Working Groups play an important role within the consortium. They demonstrate that a direct benefit of joining CESSDA is being able to join its expert communities.

Trust in digital repositories and services

The leader of CESSDA Trust Working Group, Hervé L’Hours from UK Data Service, stressed the importance of archives acquiring the CoreTrustSeal certification, and offered a meticulous and comprehensive presentation of its requirements.

"CoreTrustSeal is recognised as a valuable tool for driving internal evaluation, discussion and planning, even for archives not yet ready to apply for certification," stated Hervé L'Hours. The Trust Working Group can help service providers at different stages in the application process towards final attainment of the certification.

Training for data professionals

The consortium’s wide range of training activities were presented by Irena Vipavc Brvar from ADP (Slovenia) and leader of CESSDA Training Working Group. CESSDA and its service providers offer various thematic webinars, workshops, summer schools, and guiding tools. These services are aimed at researchers as well as national data archive staff and data professionals.

"We already have the CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide which comprises 15 hours of self-training material with expert tips," stated Irena Vipavc Brvar. The importance of continuous training of data experts was also stressed. This refers especially to the collection of sensitive personal data for research purposes and associated legal standards and research ethics.

CESSDA Data Catalogue

The CESSDA Data Catalogue was exclusively previewed to meeting attendees. The catalogue is an essential factor in making the consortium’s data findable, complying with the FAIR principles.

CESSDA Data Catalogue automatically harvests metadata from CESSDA Service Providers. John Shepherdson from UK Data Service, leader of CESSDA Technical Working Group, presented the catalogue. “At the moment, we have around 14 000 records (from 5 out of 17 Service Providers) and we are currently working on including records from the other service providers". The catalogue is designed to be user-friendly though additional ‘How to' videos to help users are also in preparation.

The catalogue provides text search and filtering. It also offers users the possibility to keep the link to a data set for later use or to share it with colleagues.

More information:

• All the conference materials are available at the official event website: https://www.cessda.eu/widening2018/
• Video about CESSDA: https://youtu.be/1EyS4u-anVo
• Read our previous news item: Continuation of CESSDA Widening in Italy

Hosted by the Interdepartmental Centre UniData – Bicocca Data Archive, a joint project of seven departments of the University of Milano-Bicocca, this year’s first Widening Meeting was held on 5 and 6 June in Milan.

Christina Messa, the rector of the University, and Giampaolo Nuvolati, Dean of the Sociology Department, welcomed the Italian initiative to join the consortium, as well as the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (MIUR).

“The Ministry expects to continue supporting the Italian role in European research infrastructures,” said Grazia Pavoncello, the Ministry delegate present at the meeting, adding that CESSDA is one of the 97 research infrastructures recognised by their national programme for research infrastructures.

In total 48 representatives from 23 European countries joined the presentations and panel discussions, eleven of which were from member or observer countries and twelve from non-member countries. Representatives from non-member countries used the opportunity to lay the foundations for a new cooperation between their institutions and CESSDA, as a first step towards membership.

The meeting succeeded to gather representatives from ministries, research councils, national archives and libraries, universities, and current CESSDA service providers from member countries. A distinguished guest, Jan Hrušák, the Vice-Chair and delegate to the European strategy forum on research infrastructures (ESFRI) participated in one of the panel sessions and held a presentation on sustainability of research infrastructures, updating the participants on the latest developments.

The meeting was a part of continuous efforts to strengthen and widen the CESSDA ERIC community across Europe and beyond. Currently, sixteen European countries are members of CESSDA ERIC and one is an observer, with several countries in the process of becoming a member. The organisers announced the continuation of the Widening project, a part of CESSDA Work Plan 2018, and invited all participants to join the next workshop in November.

More information:

• The materials from the meeting can be found at: https://www.cessda.eu/widening2018/
• Video about CESSDA: https://youtu.be/1EyS4u-anVo

“CESSDA service providers acquiring an internationally recognised certification such as CoreTrustSeal is the best signal that we can send that CESSDA offers high quality data services based on a network of trusted repositories all across Europe,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

When a country joins CESSDA, it assigns a national service provider to undertake all tasks related to acquiring, curating and providing access to social science data in their own country and across Europe. These service providers play an active part across all CESSDA activities.

A high number of certified service providers has been achieved with the support of the Trust Working Group (also Trust Group), created by CESSDA to offer guidance and support on this important topic. The Trust Working Group is tasked with introducing service providers to TDR and the CoreTrustSeal, as well as offering both workshops to cover the requirements and supporting evidence in detail, and pre-submission internal peer-reviews of self-assessments by service providers. All service providers can also request advice and guidance on particular issues directly to the working group members.

Though it is expected that the number of certified providers will continue to rise over the coming years, the Trust Group also supports those not yet in a position to apply. A key factor in the CESSDA strategy is to strengthen and widen its membership. The Trust Group supports these new and aspiring service providers which may face challenges ranging from being in the early archival design phase, to needing support in developing appropriate evidence, or simply facing a lack of the national funding necessary to mature.

“The fact that nine out of CESSDA’s seventeen service providers are currently certified, with others on their way, is a positive sign for CESSDA as a distributed research infrastructure. It shows that the CESSDA data repositories are keen to adopt best practice and apply the latest standards. I would like to thank Heiko Tjalsma from DANS for his stewardship of the Trust Working Group as part of the successful CESSDA Strengthening and Widening project, I look forward to working with the group members and CESSDA service providers,” stated Hervé L’Hours from UK Data Service, recently appointed Chair of the CESSDA Trust Working Group.

More information:

• CESSDA Trust Working Group
• List of certified repositories

“CESSDA has achieved a great deal over the last few years, with numerous ongoing joint activities with CESSDA service providers working closely together towards common goals. Dedicated working groups deliver regular results in a variety of areas of relevance to all involved, such as trust, training and technology in data management and preservation. Tools and services are being rolled out that address key issues of CESSDA: trust, transparency, knowledge exchange and FAIR data," stated Ivana Ilijašić Veršić, COO of CESSDA ERIC.

With its distributed, sustainable and trusted platform, CESSDA can offer researchers a comprehensive set of tools and services to curate, publish and re-use research data. In recognising the central role of the human factor, CESSDA also offers a wide range of expert training guides for researchers, covering the whole research life cycle.

Current widening activities will be presented and a panel discussion will address experiences from three potential member countries, Macedonia, Serbia and Ukraine. Participants will also find out about the upcoming CESSDA help desk and mentorship programme, aimed at interested non-member countries.

The event is a unique opportunity to take stock of some critical topics. Attendees from national ministries, research councils and data service providers will learn about social science research infrastructures in Italy, how to develop sustainable research infrastructures from the perspective of ESFRI¹ as well as the particular case of CESSDA, and not least, a recent proposal by all social sciences and humanities ESFRI ERICs to form a social sciences and humanities data platform, the SSH Cloud.

“The SSH Cloud will allow European researchers and other data users in the social sciences and humanities to effectively manage and access data, tools and training. It will contribute to the open science agenda and to the European Open Science Cloud, while ensuring multidisciplinary collaboration,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

Also addressed during the workshop are CESSDA Training activities on sharing and reusing research and the CESSDA Data Catalogue to be released this summer. In addition, two round table discussions will take place on how to successfully develop national data archive services and on trust in the CESSDA context and the CoreTrustSeal.

Background:

The “Strengthening and Widening of the European infrastructure of social science data archives” workshop is organised by CESSDA in collaboration with the Interdepartmental Centre UniData – Bicocca Archive and addresses the results, services and future vision of CESSDA. It is specifically tailored to representatives from ministries, research councils and service providers of potential new member countries, with the aim of demonstrating the added value and the benefits of joining the CESSDA community.

Find out more: https://www.cessda.eu/widening2018/

Contact CESSDA (cessda@cessda.eu) to get involved.

¹ European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (www.esfri.eu)

The year 2017 was a busy one for FSD. A dominating theme in operations development and numerous training sessions was preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union and concurrent changes to the national legislation. For instance, FSD produced its first “data balance sheet” to map out its current level of data protection and development needs in data archive work. FSD also revised its agreement texts to be in line with GDPR’s requirements. Terminology work as well as practices involving data anonymisation, processing and long-term preservation were also developed in 2017. Quantitative data files are now produced in the CSV format in addition to the SPSS portable format. Moreover, data descriptions of previously archived datasets were updated.

FSD redesigned its “Data by Theme” page, which introduces data series and datasets on certain themes. New themes were also included. To top the year off, a theme page entitled “Life in the 100-year-old Finland”, which introduces research data collected in Finland in 2017, was published in December.

The search function of the Aila Data Service was updated. (...)

FSD’s year 2017 in figures:

• 85 new datasets
• 1,050 contacts made regarding data acquisition
• 12.51GB of archived data
• 1,338 datasets available on Aila
• 647 depositors from 130 different organisations
• 2,905 datasets downloaded for reuse
• 932 registered downloaders of data
• Altogether 3,134 registered Aila users
• ...

More information:

• The Annual Report can be downloaded (in Finnish).
• Full-length news item on the FSD website.

There were fourteen participants from CESSDA Service Providers from Germany, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, UK, Portugal, Switzerland, the Czech Republic and Greece.

Participants learned about the CESSDA PID policy principles and best practices, and an open discussion followed on the extent to which the CESSDA PID principles support FAIR principles, looking at specific use cases.

The CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy was developed by the CESSDA PID Taskforce, consisting of members of GESIS (lead), SND and DANS. The first version of it was published in November 2017.

The aim this year is to support the implementation of the CESSDA PID Policy by the CESSDA service providers. Extended Best Practice Guidelines will be created on specific topics related to the FAIR principles.

Feedback from participants included the following suggestions:

• a common terminology and a shared understanding of terms related to PID within the CESSDA context
• guidance concerning versioning of documents and best practices of PIDs for large, international studies (e.g. ISSP)
• common rules defined by CESSDA for versioning but also for further issues such as citation of data
• need for further discussion especially with CESSDA working groups
• further training and information on persistent identifiers.

Mari Kleemola, from FSD who attended the meeting and leads the new CESSDA Tools and Services Group explained, that this group will take a look at all the needs and demands and will prioritise them in line with the CESSDA strategy.

Participants were highly appreciative of the event and were thankful for the opportunity to share experiences.

More information:

Materials from the event

CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy in 2017

RDA event page

The Technical Officer provides a highly productive development, test and production environment as well as maintaining, supporting and documenting the IT-infrastructure for CESSDA.

Find out more.

View the job on LinkedIn.

Deadline

The closing date for applications is 8 June 2018.

Recurring variables in the FNES data include, for example, interest in politics and elections as well as questions about voting and abstaining from voting. The variables also include respondents’ political attitudes and views on democracy.

The FNESdata portal is available in English and was developed using the Colectica platform.

The new service is likely to be of particular interest to election researchers, and the fact that it is available in English will further facilitate the use of Finnish election studies abroad.

The FNESdata Longitudinal Survey Metadata Portal is available on the FSD website at www.fsd.uta.fi/fnesdata.

More information:

• Original news item on the FSD website.

The workshop was organised in eight sessions and followed the structure of the Expert Tour Guide, introducing RDM planning, data organisation, documentation and processing, data storage as well as legal issues and data archiving. Moreover, it focused on training methods and training materials developed by the CESSDA Training Group to improve trainings on research data management.

The event was highly interactive with time dedicated to discussions and sharing experiences. It improved trainers’ skills on how to best design and deliver training. It also helped members of the CESSDA Training Group to see how to improve the Expert Tour Guide in the future.

In total 17 participants from various European countries joined the workshop, affiliated to CESSDA Service Providers, such as AUSSDA, DANS, GESIS or SND as well as partner organisations and other institutes outside of CESSDA, e.g. the Rudjer Boskovic Institute and the Institute for Social Research in Zagreb, the Dublin City University, Uni Data of University Bicocca, the University of Oslo and the Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon.

According to received feedback from participants, the event was helpful and overall, participants were very satisfied with the workshop. They thought that the content of each session was “quite good” and were pleased with the flow of the workshop. At the end of the workshop, they felt that they knew which tools to use for data management, where to find information and how to use the Expert Tour Guide. They also felt confident about providing training in the near future.

Some of the suggestions made for improving the Expert Tour Guide and for further training materials were: more tips and practical examples, group activities, more content on GDPR and legal issues, as well as on training methods.

For further information have a look at the Expert Tour Guide on Data Management.

Photo credits: ADP

Citing the project coordinator, Ivana Ilijašić Veršić, Chief Operations Officer at CESSDA ERIC, the article presents the main project outcomes.

A new social science data archive service for Europe

The EU-funded CESSDA SAW project is supporting Europe’s next generation of social scientists via a seamless social science data archive service.

To better coordinate the diverse research happening across the European Research Area (ERA), the EU-funded CESSDA SaW project established a seamless social science data archive service. The result is a service capable of supporting the research needs of the next generation of social scientists regardless of where in Europe, or beyond, they are located.

“The project has successfully initiated the transformation of the user experience of social science data in the ERA, with more and more evidence and insight being made available to those tackling social and economic issues of Europe,” says project coordinator Ivana Ilijasic Versic.

Read the full article on the CORDIS website.

More information:

• Visit the CESSDA SaW website.

Based on the results of the survey, FSD is a helpful and reliable organisation, whose expertise meets the needs of the customer. Users also believed that FSD’s work as a contributor to the development of science is important for society.

Of all the services offered by FSD, the most popular one among the respondents was the Aila Data Service, which is used for reading descriptions of datasets and downloading data for re-use (e.g. research, teaching or study). Over 80 percent of the respondents had browsed data and variables on Aila and over 70 percent had downloaded data.

The user satisfaction survey conducted in November 2017 was targeted at registered users of the Aila Data Service and people who had deposited data and acted as contact persons for deposited data. A total of 269 responses to the survey were received, which constitute nine percent of the 2,917-customer sample. The majority of respondents were students and researchers at universities and universities of applied sciences.

Figure 1: Satisfaction with data and services provided by FSD

Source: FSD

Find out more on the FSD website.

When it comes to participants’ role in research data management, 29% identified themselves as researchers and 23% as trainers or as providing data support in research data management. Sixty-three participants showed an interest in planning to use the Expert Tour Guide for teaching and 102 participants for self-learning about good data management practices, either taking the complete tour or selected modules.

Half the participants had been informed about the webinar by a colleague or friend. The best promotion channels for this event were the UK Data Service and CESSDA ERIC websites, as well as various mailing lists (e.g. OpenAIRE, Jisc Research Data Management). Participants also found out about the webinar from social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Suggestions made for improvements to the Tour Guide and for future webinars were:

• A more detailed walk-through the Tour Guide
• Short webinars on each of the chapters
• Specific examples to be included in the guide
• Similar training resources for STEM researchers
• Webinars on the implications of the EU GDPR for research

More information:

• Audience characteristics and feedback can be seen on Tableau Public
• Webinar presentation and video recording
• Expert Tour Guide on Data Management
• The Love Data Week

One of the main achievements, developed over the last three years is the CESSDA Data Catalogue. It will be a trusted platform for researchers wanting to find and reuse social science and humanities research data. The goal is to create a central one-stop-shop for search/discovery of the data available from within the CESSDA community.

"To realise the Data Catalogue, we had to create several back-office products over the past few years” stated Mari Kleemola, leader of CESSDA metadata management work and Development Manager at the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). "We had to agree on a subset of metadata, build a metadata harvesting service, set up a data access policy. These were necessary steps in ensuring that data can be both findable and accessible from a single place,” Mari Kleemola added.

“It is our ambition to be recognised as a leading European Research Area technical infrastructure. The CESSDA Data Catalogue is our "raison d’être” as a distributed research infrastructure and will bring with it long-awaited and precious services to social science data users,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

The CESSDA Technical Working Group has coordinated work on the upcoming data catalogue. "We want the Data Catalogue to be the first interaction point between researchers and CESSDA Service Providers. It needs to support diverse functionality and workflows to fulfil this role,” stated John Shepherdson, Platform Delivery Director at CESSDA ERIC.

The CESSDA Data Catalogue will be launched in April.

More information:

• Find out more about joint innovation projects in our annual Work Plans
• Find out more about our Technical Framework

The aim of the workshop is to train participants in how to use the developed materials when delivering their own training courses on research data management. The workshop will be interactive with hands-on exercises.

Participants will also gain an understanding of relevant considerations for making data openly available while still meeting the needs of data protection (in accordance with legislative and ethical requirements).

Employees of CESSDA Service Providers and CESSDA partnering organisations, as well as employees of affiliated organisations and research institutions are welcome to join the workshop.

Speakers:

• Irena Vipavc Brvar & Sonja Bezjak, Social Science Data Archives (ADP)
• Ricarda Braukmann, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
• Ulf Jakobsson, Swedish National Data Service (SND)
• Jindrich Krejci & Johana Chylikova, Czech Social Science Data Archive (CSDA)
• Sebastian Netscher, CESSDA Training
• Scott Summers, UK Data Service

Find out more and register to the workshop before 9 March!

Another major result for policy development and benchmarking was the Country Report on Development Potential, a comprehensive overview mapping the current state of play of data archive services in 44 – mainly European – countries. “We had a mix of experienced, new and potential service providers. For countries without any infrastructure, we set up a Guide for National Planning for Setting Up New Data Services, which is on developing social science research data policy and how to work towards the establishment of a national data service provider” stated Ivana Ilijasic Versic, project coordinator and Chief Operations Officer of CESSDA.

The project also developed important input for CESSDA’s Quality Assessment model, serving as a quality check of its service providers. This model also helps national actors to identify gaps between the need for efficient and trustworthy services and the actual services offered.

For Service Providers, a Knowledge Exchange platform was developed and is now up and running on CESSDA’s Intranet. In addition, several training modules on archiving, data curation and infrastructure design have been made available.

“We enjoyed the meetings and workshops where policy officers, service provider’s staff, and high officials from EC and ministries met and cooperated. Two years on, CESSDA is a stronger and renowned social science data infrastructure,” stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA. “And in addition, the project ended on time and within its assigned budget”.

“The CESSDA SaW project was a success and accomplished what it set out to achieve. Our impact on a pan-European level is clearly visible. We have engaged national ministries and other funding bodies and their interest in CESSDA proves that we have positioned ourselves as one of the major players in the research infrastructure arena. Two new countries joined CESSDA, and more countries are in the pipeline for becoming a member,” stated Ron Dekker.

“After the project, CESSDA will continue the “SaW” meetings with established and new service providers and with countries that are interested in setting up a social science data infrastructure. In May, we will have a meeting in Paris and in autumn 2018 we will meet in Prague” stated Ivana Ilijasic Versic.

View the article on the CESSDA SaW website.

More information on CESSDA’s Strengthening and Widening activities:

CESSDA ERIC
Ivana Ilijasic Versic, Chief Operations Officer
Ivana.Versic@CESSDA.EU
Tel +47 55 58 36 54

You will learn about best practices in data management to make research data findable, understandable, sustainably accessible and reusable.

Early career social scientists will gain help with planning, organising, documenting, processing, storing and protecting data, as well as sharing and publishing data.

Speakers

• Gunn Inger Lyse, NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data
• Ulf Jakobsson, Swedish National Data Service (SND)
• Ellen Leenarts, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS)
• Veerle Van den Eynden, UK Data Service

The webinar is part of the Love Data Week, which aims to raise awareness and engage around research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse.

Join the webinar.

"We work on better accessibility of data. It is crucial for researchers to have seamless access to relevant social science data in a safe and secure way.

As CESSDA service providers, European data archives are also regularly developing tools and services to simplify and improve the depositing of data.

CESSDA emphasises safety in data preservation and reuse. Researchers must have safe and secure access to data, including sensitive data.

This is why all CESSDA service providers should aim to receive the CoreTrustSeal certification, awarded to trusted digital repositories."

What kinds of services will CESSDA offer to researchers?

"The data catalogue, which will be available in 2018, will contain the metadata of all data in the holdings of CESSDA service providers. It will be a one-stop-shop for search and discovery, enabling effective access to European research data for researchers.

The catalogue is a big technical feature and one which CESSDA has been meticulously working at for several years, under the stewardship of the CESSDA Technical Group.

Alongside data technology improvements, CESSDA will also provide a number of trainings. Technology and training go hand in hand.

The CESSDA website itself is a useful resource for researchers as they can find out more about the archives and services in each country in one place. Regular news items and postings on social media channels also mean that researchers can easily follow happenings within CESSDA. These channels provide easy access to information on upcoming trainings, for example."

Read the whole interview on the FSD website.

More information:

• Editorial and contents of issue 48 (1/2018)

The CESSDA CTO is a member of the Management Team and is responsible for oversight of all technical aspects and technology resources within CESSDA. The CTO will establish, maintain and evolve a technology vision for CESSDA and lead the ERIC's technology development.

Find out more.

View job on Linkedin.

Senior Financial Manager

The Senior Financial Manager plans, establishes, oversees, coordinates and performs financial management of projects as well as the budget and accounts of CESSDA ERIC. Cooperates with the Senior Project Manager on contacts with parties on financial reporting for EU and similar projects.

Find out more.

View job on Linkedin.

Senior Project Manager

The Senior Project Officer plans, establishes, coordinates and performs management of internal and external projects at CESSDA. Coordinates the drafting and prepares the submission of project proposals.

Find out more.

View job on Linkedin.

Deadline

The closing date for applications is 28 February 2018.

The conference brought together just under a hundred DDI users and professionals from all over Europe and the world. Anyone interested in developing, applying, or using DDI was invited to attend the conference.

As always, several conference workshops were organised before the start of the conference on various DDI topics and attended by the conference participants.

Before the conference, Azadeh MahmoudHashemi, Wolfgang Zenk-Möltgen, Alexander Mühlbauer and Esra Akdeniz took the opportunity to organise a side meeting for the EuroQuestionBank project. Another side meeting took place for the CESSDA Metadata Management project), in which Wolfgang Zenk Möltgen and Kerrin Borschweski participated.

The conference covered a wide range of topics relating to DDI: case studies, mature implementations, early implementations, interplay of DDI with other standards and technologies and projects in early phases in which DDI is under consideration and critiques of DDI.

Keynote speaker Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC presented "DDI is not enough" (see picture) and Ingo Barkow addressed "Research Data Management in Switzerland - a National Perspective"). Irena Vipavc Brvar, Irena Bolko, both Social Science Data Archives (ADP), University of Ljubljana, led a session on perspectives for implementing the CESSDA Metadata Model: "Is Re-use of Metadata Just a Vision? What is Missing for Reality?".

Some numbers:

• 93 participants from 51 organisations (32 academic – thereof 19 archives, 11 official statistics, 4 supranational, 4 commercial) in 20 countries
• 41 women and 52 men participated
• 2 keynotes
• 24 concurrent presentations
• 1 panel discussion
• 3 tutorials
• 5 posters
• 2 reports
• 3 side meetings

The next EDDI conference will take place on 4 and 5 December 2018 in Berlin. The conference is organised by the SOEP (German Socio-Economic Panel) at the DIW Berlin (German Institute for Economic Research).

The photograph shows Ron Dekker (CESSDA ERIC Director) during his keynote.

Find out more on the conference website.

ADP regularly takes part in international and national projects, networks and research, as such ADP contributes to continued innovation of the global scientific data infrastructure.

Here are five examples of research data, available via their data repository:

1. The Slovenian Public Opinion Survey (SJM)

The SJM series closely resembles typical general social surveys which are conducted in many countries. The first survey was carried out in 1968 and has since been repeated annually. It provides relevant data about changes in subjective perceptions and attitudes of the general population. It measures the subjective evaluations of the general and economic context of Slovenian society, as well as interethnic relations in Slovenia and former Yugoslavia in connection with politics, religion and the environment.

Since 1989, SJM surveys have adopted and replicated some of the most well-known international comparative surveys, at a regional Central and East European level and at a global level. SJM takes part in the European Social Survey (ESS), the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the World Value Survey (WVS) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). SJM therefore holds a rich collection of data and metadata, available in English. It can be accessed via the ADP website or via Nesstar.

The data are always conducted on a representative population of more than 1 000 respondents. Data sets are available in the Slovene language.

Figure 1: How satisfied are you with your life? (0-Extremely dissatisfied...10-Extremely satisfied)

Source: European Social Survey - Slovenian public opinion 2002-2016

Figure 2: Are you a pessimist or an optimist? (0-pessimist...10-optimist)

Source: European Social Survey - Slovenian public opinion 2002-2016

Highlights:

• According to the SJM, Slovenians are quite satisfied with their lives!
• Over the years, the percentage of Slovenes that are satisfied with their lives has increased. The change becomes apparent when comparing the results from 2002 and 2016 in figure 1. While in 2002, 10% of respondents answered that they were dissatisfied, they were only 4% in 2016. Meanwhile, the percentage of people who are satisfied increased by 13% in the 14-year period (from 2002 to 2016). Additionally, the number of people who were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied decreased over the same period. Interestingly, the data cover a period of economic crisis in Slovenia.

Fun fact:

According to the SJM, over 50% of people consider themselves to be an optimist in 2016, while fewer than 10% consider themselves a pessimist and about 35% are neither one nor the other.

2. Study on Vocational Education in Seven European Countries (7 EU VET)

The 7 EU VET is an international project funded by the European Commission. A survey was conducted in 2011 in Austria, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom. It concerned pupils in vocational education and training and delivered the necessary quantitative data for comparative analyses. It explores a number of topics, including motivations for undertaking the course/s, views on the course and the resources that they have access to, as well as what they would like to do after they finish the course. There are also a small number of questions about participants and their family, which reflect their attitudes and opinions.

Data sets are available in English, metadata and questionnaires are available in both Slovene and English as well as in other languages.

3. Formation of Policy Networks and Lobbying in Slovenia

This research data is about policy networks and decision making. The first survey was carried out in 1996 and was repeated in 2012 (second wave). The first wave covered 70 interest groups while the second covered 97. The interest groups selected were the most active ones in the country during the survey period and in the eleven areas of interest: the economy, social policy, housing, agriculture, people with disabilities, environmental protection, health care, education, culture, sport and public relations.

The concept was used to analyse: a) the development of an interest-group system and its functioning in the context of democratic transition; b) the internal structure and characteristics of relationships among interest groups and decision makers in the policy-making process; c) lobbying methods and strategies; d) relationships between central and local government in the policy-making process; e) to trace dynamics of relationships between policy actors; f) a/the correlation between interest group networking and interest group influence in domestic policy-making processes; g) a/the correlation between the “policy network” practice and the effectiveness of the economic system; and h) the development of policy advice to governmental and non-governmental policy actors.

4. Youth 2010: Social Profile of Youth in Slovenia

The primary purpose of this research was to create a comprehensive picture of the lives of Slovenian youths (between the ages of 15 and 29). The study represents a conceptual and methodological continuation of the tradition of youth research in Slovenia, with some refinements. The methodological approach taken was on the one hand based on studies carried out in Germany (Hurrelmann et al., 2002, 2006), and on the other, on previous research on youth in Slovenia (carried out in 1985, 1993, 1995, 1997, 1998 and 2000). The main topics were: demographic changes and intergenerational cooperation, education and training, creativity, culture, leisure, digitalisation of everyday life, employment and entrepreneurship, social action, housing and living conditions, health and well-being, participation and social inclusion, voluntarism, youth mobility and globalisation.

Another research project, “Slovenian Youth 2013: Living in times of disillusionment, risk and precarity” followed in 2013. This was part of a series of surveys of young people in Germany, which, from 1953 onwards, were financially supported by Shell, a global group of energy and petrochemical companies. The surveys were carried out by independent research institutions with the goal of documenting the perceptions, general mood and expectations of young people. The German study from 2013 formed the basis of comparative studies which were carried out in Slovenia. The Slovenian Youth Survey became part of the European survey panel.

The purpose of all of the youth studies is the same - to collect data about youngsters in Slovenia. All surveys cover similar issues.

Fun fact:

Out of all age groups in Slovenia, young people are the happiest (according to the Youth 2010).

Highlights:

1. In 2010, Slovenian youths were significantly more active in the field of volunteering than in 1995.
2. Longitudinal results of EUROSTAT and youth surveys show that the number of young people between the ages of 20 and 24 following university education is considerably higher in Slovenia compared to the EU27 average (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Inclusion of generation 20-24 year-olds in tertiary education, in the period from 1999 to 2010, comparison of Slovenia and EU27

Source: EUROSTAT and Youth Research 2010 data, YOUTH 2010 Final report on the results of the survey

5. Survey Series Politbarometer

The telephone survey Politbarometer ran continuously from 1993 to 2014. Its purpose was to measure public opinion towards the government and state institutions. The survey is mostly made up of longitudinal questions, though a minority of questions relate to contemporary social and political topics or events.

It begins with questions on trust in democratic institutions and on interpersonal trust. Another series of questions intend to provide an assessment of the efficiency of state and government offices and attitudes towards European integration, asking respondents if they think that Slovenia would benefit from further European integration, as well as a sympathy rating of the main national political parties.

Respondents are also asked to position themselves on a left-right continuum based on party preference and party inclination. Finally, questions focus on assessing the respondent’s opinion on conditions in Slovenia after the Second World War. The demography section includes questions about religious affiliation, self-reported religiousness, self-assessment of social positioning, housing situation and material possessions, ethnic affiliation, marital status, employment, education and occupation, size of household, household and personal income. The survey also includes additional information on respondents such as the region that they live in, whether it is a rural or urban area, the size of the local community or city, etc.

Figure 4 : Assessment of the work of the President of the Republic

Source: Politbarometer, November 2013

Highlights:

• The President of Slovenia, Borut Pahor, was quite popular throughout 2013.
• Respondents of all ages assessed him as successful.
• Respondents with a higher education were slightly more critical when assessing the president's work.
• Left wing respondents were highly critical of Borut Pahor, despite the fact that he is of the centre left.
• The president was also particularly badly evaluated by the DL party (Civic List), with 54% of respondents evaluating him as “very unsuccessful” or “unsucessful”.

Read the previous article in the series: "Did you know that staying single lowers political turnout?".

Both are aimed at science policy makers, funding agencies and institutions and come as a follow-up to interviews and workshops held throughout the year. They are a part of the OECD Going Digital project, which “will give policymakers the tools they need to help their economies and societies prosper in a world that is increasingly digital and data-driven”.

The first report gives a comprehensive and clear overview of the business models used by and available to research data repositories. It examines the strengths and weaknesses of different business models and provides important insights into how repositories may develop their value propositions for different stakeholders/customers. As such, the report breaks new ground and addresses a significant gap in the world of research data repositories. It aims to help research data repositories, policy makers and other stakeholders better understand issues around income streams, costs, value propositions and business models.

“A key issue to address when working out business models for research data repositories is the “public good” character of research data. Moreover, the costs and returns reside with different parties; the first with repositories, data and service providers, whereas the latter lie with re-users (researchers) or with the ‘science system’ as a whole (so with funders and policy makers). The decision to deliver funding is highly dependent on the perceived value, which although clear for direct users of the data, may be less so for other stakeholders”, stated Simon Hodson, member of CESSDA Scientific Advisory Board and Executive Director of CODATA. Simon Hodson was one of two chairs of an international Expert Group who oversaw the project and the publication.

“It is not enough simply to advocate that data repositories should be funded. We need also to understand how they are funded and the implications of different funding mechanisms, revenue streams and business models. We are witnessing transformations and diversification in the funding of important data repositories. It is essential for policy makers and repository managers to understand the business models available, their strengths and weaknesses and the importance of clearly expressed and well-targeted value propositions”, he added.

Structured interviews were carried out with 48 repository managers from eighteen countries and covering a broad range of research domains. The analysis was concerned with understanding the current funding of data repositories and identifying key revenue sources, finding out whether there any innovative revenue sources are available, and how revenue sources fit together into sustainable business models. Business models were subjected to economic and stakeholder analysis to provide a summary of their strengths and weaknesses, as well as factors that may make a given business model more or less appropriate in different circumstances. Other areas of interest were possible incentives for, and means of, optimising costs and finding out what revenue sources and business models were most acceptable to key stakeholders. Five policy recommendations covering these areas were put forward.

“One important take-away message is that there are economies of scale to be found in encouraging open research data organisations to work together at all levels, national, European and global. This is what CESSDA is about”, highlighted Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC.

The second report looks into how to unlock the full potential of international research data networks, focusing on governance and funding, the challenges encountered and the lessons learnt. For this purpose, 32 separate cases of “currently successful networks” were studied. In a first phase, a general survey and structured in-depth interviews were carried out, and in a second, these overall findings led to a 2-day international workshop in Brussels, which was attended by CESSDA.

It identifies the lack of trust and policy coherence between different communities as the main barrier to open sharing of curated research data across geographic borders (and scientific domains).

“Building trust is one of the four key pillars in our strategy for 2018-2022. We focus on three aspects: stakeholder confidence (involving service providers, researchers, governments and research funders), transparency (in how we work) and advocacy (gaining full European coverage and increasing the awareness of curation and reuse)”, stated Ron Dekker.

“When it comes to addressing changing user needs, at CESSDA, we put a lot of effort into standardising metadata (data descriptions) used by our service providers. This is a necessary precondition for the upcoming CESSDA Products and Services Catalogue as well as for developing tools and services. The standardisation of metadata helps ensure that data is findable for data users and is thus the first step for us on our journey to providing FAIR data”, Ron Dekker continued.

“By presenting common challenges and potential solutions, this report lays the path for a shared understanding which is necessary to develop effective and sustainable international data networks. CESSDA is proud to have taken part in both the workshops and the interviews which supported these OECD open data reports”, added Ron Dekker.

More information:

• Business models for sustainable research data repositories
• Co-ordination and support of international research data networks
• OECD Going Digital project

The CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy is intended to support the aims of locating, discovering, referencing, identifying and citing CESSDA Service Providers’ data holdings. It serves as a basis for a common approach to the use of Persistent Identifier services.

The Policy contains requirements regarding the use of Persistent Identifiers to which the CESSDA Service Providers must adhere. The Policy framework covers the general principles for the use of Persistent Identifiers across CESSDA Service Providers (https://doi.org/10.18448/16.0040) and contains Best Practice Guidelines (https://doi.org/10.18448/16.0041).

The Best Practice Guidelines serve to provide additional information and guidance on the use and implementation of Persistent Identifiers. The document provides further guidance on key strategic issues related to the Persistent Identifier Policy (e.g. granularity, versioning, etc.).

The six principles of the Persistent Identifier Policy are aligned with the CESSDA ERIC Statutes and the CESSDA ERIC Data Access Policy. They relate to identifying, locating, resolving, referencing and citation, visibility and flexibility of each CESSDA Service Provider's data holdings.

More information:

• CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy
• CESSDA ERIC Persistent Identifier Policy Best Practice Guidelines

The online module is comprised of six chapters and takes early career social scientists on a journey through the different stages of their project, from the initial planning phase to the publication of the research data. Along the way, the reader is provided with illustrations and examples, as well as expert tips and insights into data management practices in different European countries.

The expert tour guide also provides guidance to help researchers answer questions such as: How do I handle personal data? What is the best way of documenting my data? How do I store my data safely? Can I share my data with others?

Curious to take the tour?

Visit our online guide at cessda.eu/DMGuide

More information:

• A starter package is available for trainers in data management in the social sciences who wish to organise a one-day workshop on specific topics. Our contact address is training@cessda.net.
• Project leader: Ellen Leenarts

These plans contain mission statements, a description of areas of competence and infrastructure that need to be strengthened, as well as a description of future needs, necessary resources and challenges for setting up and maintaining viable data services.

They are a blueprint for future national archives with the long-term aim of becoming a member of CESSDA ERIC. While the national development plans will certainly evolve over time, they represent a significant first step in defining concrete goals, priorities, and an organisational structure.

In addition, short and concise summaries of the plans have been drawn up in the form of media packs, which can be used to attract media attention. They are seen as a key way for data archives in the interested countries to highlight to ministries and research councils the public interest in having national data services.

These media packs include a cover message that describes the benefits of social science data services for the scientific community and the larger public. With this in mind, they were developed not only in English but also in the national language.

More information:

• National Development Plans
• Media Packs
• CESSDA SaW news

On Independence Day (6 December), FSD’s celebratory project culminates with the release of the final theme page – Life in the 100-year-old Finland. The page contains data collected in Finland in 2016 and 2017 available on FSD’s Aila Data Service. The data on the page paint one picture of what Finland is currently like and what Finns think about different issues.

The data list will be updated as new data become available.

FSD wishes everyone a wonderful Independence Day!

More information:

• Life in the 100-year-old Finland
• Data by Theme
• Official Finland 100 Programme
• Information Services Manager Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi

See the previous theme of the month: Past and future.

"It is a crucial time for CESSDA. In June this year we were granted the status of European Research Infrastructure Consortium and we now have seventeen countries joining forces to advance the social sciences in Europe. We are on track to reach full European coverage and together, we can ensure that CESSDA's newly-established strategic objectives on trust, training, technology, tools and services are met", Ron Dekker added.

"I’m very pleased that Finland is once again an official member of CESSDA and that FSD remains a member of the family of European data archives. I was certain that the General Assembly would approve the membership application because FSD personnel have important roles in so many CESSDA projects", stated Helena Laaksonen, Director of FSD.

“The Portuguese Social Information Archive (APIS) has been developing a partnership with CESSDA over the last few years. We are now looking forward to working more closely within CESSDA on the open science agenda and taking part in all of its activities”, stated Pedro Moura Ferreira, auxiliary investigator at ICS and representative for Portugal at the General Assembly.

APIS is based at the Institute of Social Sciences (Instituto de Ciências Sociais - ICS) in Lisbon, which hosted the third CESSDA SaW collaborative workshop on “Widening the European infrastructures for social science data archives” on 3-4 May 2017.

More information:

• Finland becomes a member of CESSDA ERIC
• APIS website in English

As part of the SERISS project, we have recently produced new guidelines for the management of ELSST content. These incorporate findings from the first results of the project which used back-translation to evaluate the translation quality of ELSST terms.

The new guidelines are aimed primarily at ELSST translators and content developers, but will also be of interest to end-users. They are divided into six parts, which cover the following topics:

1. overview and background information on ELSST
2. the main linguistic elements of ELSST
3. management structure
4. construction and maintenance of the thesaurus
5. the translation process
6. quality control issues

Part 1 covers the purpose, history ,scope and languages of ELSST, as well as versioning, access and copyright issues. Part 2 defines the various elements of ELSST, i.e. concepts, terms, relationships and notes. Part 3 describes the overall management structure, including the various roles and responsibilities, as well as the communication and decision making processes. Parts 4 and 5 explain how each element of the thesaurus described in Part 2 is constructed and translated. A list of vocabulary resources for the translation process is provided in an appendix. Part 6 discusses quality control issues, and includes a checklist aimed at both source language editors and translators.

The guidelines take account of ISO 25964-1, the latest international standard on thesaurus construction, published by the International Organization for Standardization, as well as the work of other knowledge organisation experts and thesaurus developers. Each part of the guidelines presents best practice for thesauri in general, followed by specific guidelines for ELSST.

Current and future uses

The new guidelines have already been used for training new ELSST translators and for briefing those who are using ELSST to index survey questions as part of ongoing work in the SERISS project. (The SERISS work consists of indexing questions from three cross-national surveys (the European Social Survey (ESS), the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the European Values Study (EVS) in three languages (German, Greek and Romanian) using ELSST terms from the relevant languages. The aim is to establish how well the ELSST terms match the content of the questions, and, at the same time, uncover any translation issues, either with the survey questions and/or the ELSST terms.)

The guidelines will also be used in the CESSDA-ELSST follow-up project, the Vocabulary Services Multilingual Content Management (VOICE) project, reported in the CESSDA-ELSST project update blog post. They will inform the new policy and procedural documents that will be required, as well as provide input for new training modules. Additional languages are planned for ELSST during the VOICE project (more details to follow). In order to increase its effectiveness, different modalities for providing translator training will be investigated.

Lorna Balkan

The event was kicked off by Vice Rector Heinz Fassmann, who was pleased about the strategic decision of establishing AUSSDA as part of the University Library. Elmar Pichl and Barbara Weitgruber from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science, Research and Economy highlighted the importance of open data, interdisciplinarity and evidence-based policies.

Cees van der Eijk of the University of Nottingham pointed out that data archives minimize the costs of scientific problem-solving, by offering tools, training and the infrastructure to study various phenomena.

Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA ERIC, illustrated the future of a European Social Data Platform, pointing out the value of linking data from various sources. He called upon researchers to archive and share their data as early as possible and to specifically target the public at large in their communication. CESSDA ERIC considers data to be the most important element for understanding society and for increasing scientific excellence and AUSSDA, as the Austrian Service Provider of CESSDA ERIC, is responsible for conveying trust and sustainability to Austrian users.

Lars Kaczmirek and Dimitri Prandner presented the launch of the new digital repository, and outlined what AUSSDA has to offer.

Klement Tockner, the President of the Austrian Science Fund, stressed that a large amount of data is not accessible to the general public. He called for transparency and a dialogue between science and society.

More information:

• Read the full story on the AUSSDA website
• Agenda, presentations and picture gallery

Photo credits: AUSSDA/derknopfdruecker.com

Attendees learned about the current state of play for big data in SC6 and within the social sciences and humanities in general and from the perspective of European official statistics. They also learned about the European Open Science agenda and the Big Data Integrator (BDI) Platform and the SC6 Pilot on "Citizen Budget on Municipal Level".

The full report and presentations are available on the Big Data Europe project website.

Methods and standards for producing FAIR data were discussed by invited experts, such as Ivana Ilijašić Veršić from CESSDA ERIC, Heiko Tjalsma from DANS, Maggie Hellström from ICOS and Magnus Geber and Karl-Magnus Johansson from the Swedish National Archives.

Heiko Tjalsma from DANS focused on certification of trusted digital repositories and FAIR data. He described the connection between certification and FAIR and raised a couple of questions concerning some unresolved FAIR complications, such as how to measure the criteria and how to include “openness” and data security.

Maggie Hellström from ICOS, a Pan-European research infrastructure for greenhouse gas and environment monitoring, emphasized that ICOS needs to be FAIR. The repository fulfils the criteria for Findable and Accessible data, and is on track to deliver Interoperability and Reusability. “We are not an isolated island, everyone interested in ICOS data must be able to download and use them. Our data are unique; we cannot go back in time to 'recreate' them, we must store them securely and sustainably to enable long-term reuse”, stated Maggie Hellström.

Ivana Ilijašić Veršić presented CESSDA ERIC and its mission as well as some of its on-going activities, such as training in data management and preservation, and developing technical solutions for a European Research Infrastructure. Ivana Ilijašić Veršić also drew attention to outcomes of the CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and Widening) project: “I am very proud of the project. We have developed many crucial tools which we will launch in December”. One such tool is the Knowledge Platform, which will serve as a central point of access for digital resources created within the CESSDA collaboration. In the final panel debate, she pointed out how crucial trusted research data repositories with FAIR data are for the research community and for open access.

More information:

• Presentations
• News item in Swedish

Aside from the historical and future perspective, the topics of the data are diverse. They include, among others, historical consciousness and identity in Finland, confidence in the future of the welfare state, and visions of the turn of the millennium.

FSD's Finland 100 project will conclude next month with the publication of the final theme page, focusing on life in Finland in 2016 and 2017, on the eve of the Independence Day, 5 December.

More information:

• Data on Past and Future
• Data by Theme
• Official Finland 100 Programme
• Information Services Manager Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi

See the previous theme of the month: Safety and Security.

1. Swiss Household Panel

The principal aim of the Swiss Household Panel (SHP) is to observe social change, in particular the dynamics of changing living conditions and representations in the population of Switzerland. It is a yearly panel study following a random sample of private households in Switzerland over time. The SHP constitutes a unique longitudinal database for Switzerland and is supported by the Swiss national science foundation. The survey covers a broad range of topics and approaches in the social sciences. Data collection started in 1999 with a sample of 5 074 households containing 12 931 household members. In 2004 a second sample of 2 538 households with a total of 6 569 household members was added; and since 2013 the SHP contains a third sample of 4 093 households and 9 945 individuals.

Fun facts: In Switzerland, more women worked in 2015 than in 1999: from 57% in 1999 to 66% in 2015 in the German-speaking part of the country, from 53% to 57% in the French-speaking part, and from 46% to 51% in the Italian-speaking part. Despite this common trend, working patterns for women still differ with regard to the linguistic regions as a reflection of cultural, social and political variations. While a similar percentage work full-time in all three regions (29% in German, 27% in French, and 24% in Italian), German-speaking women particularly differ from French-speaking women with regard to their employment in small part-time jobs (1-59%^[1]: 30% vs. 23%) and from Italian-speaking women in relation to their employment in big part-time jobs (60-89%: 23% vs. 13%).

2. SELECTS

Selects is part of different international comparative networks, such as the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) and the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS). It is a joint electoral research project of several political science departments at Swiss universities. Through Selects, it has been possible to study voting behaviour in Switzerland in depth in the latest four national elections. The project, started in 1995 with the ambition to connect Swiss electoral research to the state of the art at the international level, has been successful in many respects. The Selects project created a series of data sets allowing long-term comparison since 1971. FORS distributes the Selects data as well as the integrated data set for the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS), which includes 32 elections from 24 countries.

Fun facts:

1. Women are catching up. While only 39% of eligible women participated in the Swiss national elections of 1995, participation among women reached 46% in 2015. Interestingly, in 1995 only 18% of women aged between 18 and 24 took part in the federal elections compared to 24% of men in the same age group. By 2015, participation among young women and men attained an equal level of 30%. The gender gap in political participation among older age groups is slowly getting smaller, too. Whereas in 1995 the difference between men and women aged 45 and older was at 12 percentage points, it decreased to 9 percentage points in the latest elections.
2. Voters who place themselves on the left side of the political axis seem to have gained an interest in politics. Their participation in federal elections increased from 48% in 1995 to 59% in 2015. On the contrary, political participation is stagnating among Swiss citizens who place themselves on the right side of the political spectrum. Whereas 59% of them took part in the parliamentary election in 1995, this percentage decreased slightly to 55% in 2015.

3. VOTO

The VOTO project analyses, after each federal popular vote, the reasons why Swiss voters participated, and explains their decisions. Since autumn 2016, the VOTO surveys have taken over from the VOX surveys. In order to ensure continuity, the essential questions asked in the VOX survey were included in the VOTO surveys. The first VOTO survey is dedicated to the vote of 25 September 2016.

Fun facts:

1. Staying single lowers political turnout. Among singles, less than every second person reports to have taken part in the last popular vote. On the other hand, two out of three citizens who are married state that they participated in the last ballot. The difference between these two groups was on average 14 percentage points between 1981 and 1990. Over the years it has however significantly grown to a staggering 26 percentage points over the last 10 years.
2. The least complicated voting proposal in the last 35 years was the popular initiative for the introduction of a public holiday on the Swiss national day, 1 August. When asked how difficult it was to come to a vote decision, 92% of the respondents stated that it was rather easy for them. This initiative was put to the vote in 1993 and accepted by a vast majority of 84%. One of the most complicated voting proposals was the Corporate Tax Reform Act II in 2008. 61% of the surveyed voters found it difficult to reach their vote decision.

4. MOSAiCH - ISSP

MOSAiCH (Measurement and Observation of Social Attitudes in Switzerland) is a cross-sectional social survey programme that focuses on the Swiss population’s values and attitudes towards a wide range of social issues. The respondents are drawn from a probabilistic sample representing the country’s population aged 18 and above. The questionnaire is basically divided into three parts: a first part with core questions on socio-political and socio-demographic topics that remain unchanged in every round; a second part with the current module(s) of the International Social Survey Program (ISSP) and a third part with additional questions gathered through an open call to the Swiss academic community. The ISSP is a long-standing survey conducted in more than 40 countries all over the world, with Swiss data going back as far as 1987. The specific design of the MOSAiCH survey offers researchers an overall data set that allows for cross-country, cross-time and cross-module analysis.

Fun facts:

1. Almost 80 percent (79%) of the population in Switzerland would enjoy having a paid job even if they did not need the money. Almost every second respondent (47%) would turn down another job that offered quite a bit more pay in order to stay with the organisation that they work for (MOSAiCH-ISSP 2015).
2. Federalism, Neutrality and Direct Democracy: unbroken popularity since the beginning of MOSAiCH. The population in Switzerland supports the characteristic features of its political system. In 2007, 77% of the population spoke in favour of maintaining direct democracy in Switzerland, in 2015 this number slightly increased to 81%. People in Switzerland also support the principle of neutrality (from 64% in 2007 to 75% in 2015) and a majority thinks that federalism should remain unchanged (from 51% in 2007 to 63% in 2015).

5. TREE

TREE (Transitions from Education to Employment) surveys post-compulsory educational and labour market pathways of school leavers in Switzerland, being the country’s first prospective longitudinal study of this type at a national level. The project’s first cohort (TREE1) is based on a sample of approximately 6 000 young people who participated in the PISA survey of the year 2000 and left compulsory school the same year. This sample has been followed up by means of seven survey panels on a yearly basis from 2001 until 2007 and two further survey panels in 2010 and 2014. A further panel wave is planned for 2019 (with an average respondent’s age of 35). The longitudinal observation of a second school leavers’ cohort (TREE2) started in 2016. With this extension to a multi-cohort design, Switzerland is among the few countries worldwide in which comparative inter-cohort analyses can be carried out.

Read the previous article in the series: "Open if possible, protected if needed: Research data via DANS".

[1] 100% corresponds to a full-time workload.

Project partners were honoured to welcome two distinguished speakers: Peter Brown, Director of the Irish Research Council, who presented the Irish funding landscape, the perceived impact of Brexit on higher education and research and the council's support for joining CESSDA ERIC; and Harry Tuinder, from the European Commission (DG Research & Innovation, Research Infrastructures Unit (B4)), who emphasised the importance both of securing long-term sustainability for European Research Infrastructures and of the European Open Science Cloud for ESFRI Landmarks.

All of the presentations from the final conference can be found on the project website.

AUSSDA expects an employee with a doctorate in social sciences or at least five years of pertinent experience in the field with leadership experience. Applicants must be comfortable working in German.

Deadline for applications: 13 November.

Find out more on the AUSSDA website.

The Nordic countries have to comply with the new rules for personal data protection as stipulated in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), EU Regulation 2016/679.

A Norwegian initiative, led by NSD, aims to contribute to improved Nordic coordination of laws and regulations for personal data protection in research. The project group has published a position paper which was sent to the Nordic Council of Ministers on 10 September 2017.

In this paper, the Nordic network-project encourages the Nordic ministries to remember the importance and value of Nordic scientific research, especially register-based research, when drafting the national laws. It further states that: "Good and explicit conditions for research will send a clear signal that research is an important activity in the interest of society (...) Unambiguous wording with regards to the status of scientific, statistical and historical purposes within the privacy regulation is paramount in establishing that privacy protection and access to personal information for scientific purposes can go hand in hand".

With the implementation of the GDPR, the Nordic countries now face an unprecedented opportunity to create a common legal framework.

Further information:

• Read the full position paper.
• The Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) has published "Data Management Guidelines" which aim to help researchers take data protection into consideration.
• The Swedish National Data Service (SND) has published a video about the benefits of register-based research and the opportunities it provides.
• See the NSDNews from April 2017 "New EU rules open the door to Nordic cooperation".

In the year covered by the report, the UK Data Service was instrumental in supporting researchers to create shareable and reusable data. In collaboration with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the UK Data Service was awarded a Wellcome Trust grant to investigate ways to encourage sharing and reuse by examining current attitudes and practices of researchers to open science. To understand issues researchers face when working with challenging data, experiences from researchers who have deposited data with the UK Data Service were collected in to a series of 'depositor stories' as guidance for other researchers.

In 2016, the UK Data Service welcomed its first Data Impact Fellows, a programme which aims to provide career development for early career researchers who use data from the UK Data Service in their work with a focus on impact. The first Undergraduate Dissertation Prize was also launched, which recognises and rewards undergraduate students who demonstrated flair and originality in using quantitative data available through the UK Data Service for their dissertations.

New support and resources for teachers and students have also been developed and the UK Data Service Quiz App, putting social facts into context for young people, was launched. Collaborative training involved the UK Data Service working with the Office for National Statistics (ONS) as well as international partners such as CESSDA ERIC, the new Indian Social Science Data Archive and researchers in South Africa working with big data. The Secure Lab was used to support impactful research and staff at the UK Data Service continued to take part in the working group Safe Data Access Professionals to promote best practice.

2016/17 was also a time for the UK Data Service to respond to changes in the national data landscape with involvement in the consultation on data sharing (prior to the Digital Economy Bill), the Concordat Working Group on Open Research and the data and statistical disclosure review of ONS Special Licence Scheme.

The second #DataImpact event was organised, which focused on identifying data solvable challenges and exploring data re-use in policy and research. Two open Data Dives were held to work with data in a creative way.

On the technology front, ground-breaking data was made openly available via UKDS.Stat with the inclusion of the Human Rights Atlas and UNESCO data. The infrastructure for the UK Data Service big data platform was also developed, which enables seamless safe access by linking data on physical servers and cloud-based data storage.

More information:

• The Annual Report can be viewed online or downloaded.
• Send a request by email for a printed copy.

The project, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), had three main aims:

• merging and improving the (internal) management interface of both thesauri
• updating and improving the (external) user interface of both thesauri
• reviewing and updating the thesauri’s content

All three goals have been achieved.

New thesaurus management system

The new thesaurus management system, which brought the two thesauri onto the same development platform, was launched in January 2015. Since then, work has focused on streamlining the workflow for concept management and improving reporting functions.

Two new separate, but visually similar, user interfaces were also launched in January 2015. They enable the user to access HASSET and ELSST at https://hasset.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ and https://elsst.ukdataservice.ac.uk/ respectively. An innovative feature of both is the interactive visual graph view which provides an alternative way of navigating thesaurus terms and relationships rather than the standard form view.

Both the thesaurus management system and the user interfaces have undergone two stages of development, in response to user feedback, and the latest versions are due for release later this year.

Updated content

Work on developing the content of HASSET and ELSST has progressed in full collaboration with ELSST translators. Communication is conducted via a dedicated email list and quarterly online meetings. The input from all who have contributed has greatly enhanced the status of ELSST as a multilingual resource and the level of commitment shown by everyone is testament to the value placed on ELSST by both the individuals concerned and their institutions.

We are pleased to report that during the lifetime of the project, four new languages have been added to ELSST: Czech, Lithuanian and Romanian (in 2015) and Slovenian (in 2017). In addition, two new archives, the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), and the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AuSSDA) have joined us to contribute to the translation of French and German respectively.

The project also achieved its goal of an annual release of ELSST through two releases (in September 2016 and September 2017).

Future funding

We are happy to announce that further funding has been secured for ELSST from January 2018 – December 2018 via the CESSDA Vocabulary Services Multilingual Content Management (VOICE) work plan. This work will involve the continuation of content development and extension to more languages (details to be confirmed). The UK Data Service will continue to lead the work, with FSD and GESIS as lead partners. The UK Data Service and many ELSST partners are also involved in other related CESSDA projects, including the Euro Question Bank (EQB), the CESSDA Metadata Management (CMM) project, and the Controlled Vocabularies (CV) Manager project. Further information about all these projects can be found at https://www.cessda.eu/Projects/Work-Plans

In the meantime, we would like to thank all those who helped make CESSDA-ELSST a success, and we look forward to working with you all in the next phase of ELSST’s development.

The Thesaurus Team

The core services are: DataverseNL for short-term data management, EASY for long-term archiving, and NARCIS, the national portal for research information. By participating in (inter)national projects, networks and research, DANS contributes to continued innovation of the global scientific data infrastructure. Via EASY, an online archiving system for depositing and downloading research data, the following examples of research data are available:

1. Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies

The Dutch Parliamentary Election Studies (DPES) are a series of national surveys carried out under the auspices of the Dutch Electoral Research Foundation (SKON). These surveys have been conducted since 1970. Studies since 1971 were conducted before and after the national parliamentary elections. Panel studies are also conducted within the framework of the DPES.

Many questions are replicated across studies, although each has questions not asked in the others. The major substantive areas consistently covered include the respondents' attitudes toward and expectations of the government and its effectiveness in both domestic and foreign policy, the most important problems facing the people of the Netherlands, the respondents' voting behaviour and participation history, and his/her knowledge of and faith in the nation's political leaders.

Question wordings and variables are available (both in Dutch and English) via the question bank http://nkodata.nl/.

2. Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study

The Netherlands Longitudinal Lifecourse Study (NELLS) comprises wave 1 and 2 of a panel study on an initial sample of 5 312 inhabitants of the Netherlands, age group 15-45, with oversamples of the Moroccan and Turkish minorities. The variables include family background indicators, socio-demographic and socio-economic background variables, social inequality, social cohesion and integration, a large set of values, norms and attitudes, and leisure time items.

Highlight from the study: Scientists argue that the second generation of Turkish and Moroccan Dutch increasingly resemble indigenous peoples as a result of cultural integration. However, this integration is not yet found to be smooth as they do not really mix much with members outside of their group. This is for example due to their own preferences.

3. International Crime Victims Surveys

The International Crime Victims Surveys (ICVS), from the Tilburg University International Victimology Institute, look at householders’ experience with crime, policing, crime prevention and feelings of insecurity in a large number of countries. The ICVS began in 1989, with further waves taking place in 1992, 1996 and 2000. The initiative developed into a truly unique global project in 2005, during the last wave.

Highlight: Over a time span of fifteen years, more than 300 000 people have been interviewed about their experiences with victimisation and related subjects in 78 different countries. According to UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute), “the ICVS is the most comprehensive instrument developed thus far to monitor and study volume crimes, perceptions of crime and attitudes towards the criminal justice system”^[1].

4. Cultural changes in the Netherlands

Since 1975, the Netherlands Institute for Social Research (Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau - SCP) has been running the Cultural Change in the Netherlands (Culturele Veranderingen in Nederland 2006) survey. The aim is to systematically survey opinions among the Dutch population in order to increase the understanding of cultural changes. The survey is repeated every two years with a net response of around 2 000 persons. The questions relate to the following topics: security, crime, living, social contacts, leisure time, health, emancipation, homosexuality, social security, migration, Islam, living conditions. Furthermore, the database also contains a large number of background variables, including on religion, political conviction, income and education.

Question wordings and variables are available via the question bank http://scpdata.nl/.

5. The Time Use Research Survey

The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) has been carrying out the Time Use Research Survey (Tijdsbestedingsonderzoek) among the population of the Netherlands every five years since 1975. This is done with the help of the Centre for Time Use Research. In addition to a number of background questions and some general questions about time management, respondents are asked to keep a quarterly journal for a week containing their activities during that period.

Highlights on personal time:

For the last time research survey (TBO 2011), just under 2 000 Dutch citizens spread throughout the country recorded their activities in a diary over the course of a week. This mass of data produced a detailed picture of the many and diverse activities that people in the Netherlands undertake in their daily lives.

Where are people saving time and which people are they? The study shows that the savings in obligatory tasks derive not from a reduction in paid work but in the time spent looking after the household and care tasks. Dutch people spent an average of 2.4 hours per week less on the household in 2011 (and especially the more routine domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc.) than in 2006 (17.9 hours in 2011 versus 20.3 hours in 2006). The reduction is actually slightly greater among 20-64 year-olds. Both men and women (in proportion to their input) spent less time on the household. The biggest reduction in time spent on these tasks is in households with young children aged up to four years and households with children of secondary school age (12-17 years). In addition, people with part-time jobs (1-34 hours per week paid work) and people who are not in paid work, in particular, have reduced the amount of time devoted to household tasks. There was no net change over the period studied in the amount of time devoted to paid work. That, too, is a break with the past: for a long time, the time spent on paid work increased steadily.

Source: SCP (2013), Keeping an eye on the time, a look at how the Dutch spend their time.

Open Access

DANS encourages researchers to grant open access to their data. Open access data in EASY are subject to the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence, a common international standard. This means that depositors waive all rights to their data when they deposit them as an open access dataset in EASY. The data then enter the public domain. Interested parties may freely reuse the open access datasets, but DANS does require its users to cite the data in accordance with scientific practice.

Because not all data can be available open access (yet), DANS also offers other access categories to the data, besides open access: 1) unlimited access to all registered EASY users, 2) access with depositor’s authorisation only and 3) access from another source – the data are permanently archived at DANS but available through another organisation.

Read the previous article in the series: "Democracy, youth, development, values and attitudes: Five data sets from FSD".

^[1] http://www.unicri.it/news/article/0903-2_Bari

^[2] https://www.scp.nl/Onderzoek/Tijdsbesteding/Met_het_oog_op_de_tijd

The next theme page will be published 6 November and the final one focusing on life in Finland in 2016 and 2017 will be available on the eve of Finland's Independence Day, 5 December.

More information:

• Data on Safety and Security
• Data by Theme
• Official Finland 100 Programme

The Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP) are keen supporters of CESSDA and the cross-national harmonization of archives. We firmly believe that translating the ELSST thesaurus is an important step towards achieving this goal. However, as a small team, we lack the necessary resources to fully engage in the translation project.

In the past few years ADP has been liaising with the Slovenian Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure (CLARIN), sharing our knowledge and experience. For ADP, using digital language technologies offered a promising way to reduce the time and effort of the translation process

Automatic translation

Translating ELSST into Slovenian was carried out as a joint project consisting of two steps: automatic translation undertaken by a team of language technology experts, followed by manual editing of the translation by ADP with the support of terminology experts from the relevant subject domains.

In the first phase, the expert team selected and prepared several translation sources. The linguistic expert chose more general translation resources while ADP proposed subject dictionaries. Before translating, all terms and translations from the various translation sources were converted to upper case (as required by ELSST) and all plural-form ELSST source language terms were changed to singular to match the form in the translation sources.

Next, each whole English term was looked up in every translation source, and the results collated. Often the same translation was found in multiple sources. If no translations of the whole term were found, translations were constructed. English terms were subdivided and each subpart was translated independently. The translations of the subparts were then combined to produce a final Slovenian translation of the source term.

Manual editing

In the second phase, ADP team performed a manual check of the automatic translations, verifying and editing them if needed. This phase was subdivided into five tasks:

• Choosing the best option among the translations produced from the various sources (as a result of the automatic translation)
• Checking and highlighting the terms with potentially problematic translations (e.g. no appropriate translation, multiple options)
• Checking the translations where issues were detected and seeking advice from subject experts
• Consulting the linguistic expert on Slovenian grammar rules
• Confirming the final list of translations

This was the first time that ELSST translation has been undertaken using semi-automatic translation. We believe that this allowed us not only to produce appropriate Slovenian translations but also to reduce our workload.

Further information

A more thorough explanation of the process described above and the algorithms used is beyond the scope of this blog post. However, should you be interested in reading more we are happy to hear from you and provide you with additional information. You can contact us either by replying to this blog post or by sending an email to
arhiv.podatkov@fdv.uni-lj.si.

Sonja Bezjak and Irena Bolko

See also CESSDA ELSST New Release 21 September 2017

Since the previous release in 2016 a considerable amount of changes and improvements have been made throughout all languages. The average percentage of translated preferred terms is 99%, with the majority of languages having a 100% coverage.

We are very proud to announce that Slovenian has been added as our 13^th language. The Slovenian translations of all preferred terms have been provided by our colleagues at the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP). See also https://elsst.wordpress.com/2017/09/22/translating-elsst-into-slovenian/

Finally, we are pleased to announce that our colleagues at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER) have joined us to contribute to the French translations; our colleagues at the Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AuSSDA) have joined us to contribute to the German translation.

The current version of ELSST was released on 21 September 2017. The previous version dates from 6 September 2016.

Jeannine Beeken

The Finnish National Election Studies (FNES) are nationally representative surveys conducted every four years, right after the parliamentary elections in Finland. The data is collected through face-to-face interviews and self-administered questionnaires, which means that changes in public opinion and democracy can be observed over time. Some modules are repeated but each study also contains questions on current issues. The studies chart the following main themes: political participation, political attitudes, party allegiance, candidate and party choice, the voting behaviour of Finns that are of voting age and election campaigns. Due to their popularity, the election study data are translated into English by FSD without prior request. A description of the most recent election study (2015) is available here.

Fun fact: Did you know that Finns have a very high trust in their President? According to 2015 data, 75% of all respondents said they trust the President a lot or completely. Only 27.2% trusted the Government to the same extent and the proportion of those who had a high trust in politicians was even lower, 10.5%.

2. EVA Surveys on Finnish Values and Attitudes

The EVA Surveys on Finnish Values and Attitudes, funded by the Finnish Business and Policy Forum (EVA) and conducted annually (previously every two years), have extensively studied Finnish public opinion, values, attitudes, and perceptions of the present and future since 1984. Topics covered include democracy, the market economy, welfare, the environment, society and politics, Finland's international position, and economic growth. Each data set contains both new themes and recurring ones, with questions repeated over the years. The majority of the data in the series have been translated into English by FSD. A description of the most recent survey (2017) is available here.

Fun facts:

1. Did you know that Finns do not appear to favour complete privatisation as a means to improve the efficiency of service provision? Out of the respondents of the 2017 EVA Survey, 59.5% disagreed with the statement “Most of our country’s public services should be privatised in order to improve the efficiency of service provision”, while 18.2% agreed.
2. Did you know Finns value the general knowledge acquired in basic education? 65% of respondents to the EVA Survey 2017 did not think that Finnish schools should focus on developing excellence at the cost of general knowledge. Similarly, over half of the respondents (51.2%) considered general knowledge to be the most important subject taught to children in basic education, above information retrieval, work-related skills, diligence, enthusiasm and flexibility.

3. Finnish Youth Surveys

The Finnish Youth Surveys chart attitudes and expectations of young Finnish people aged 15-29. The main topics covered are attitudes towards education, working life, social security, spending, drug use, and willingness and opportunities to participate in decision-making. Each survey contains both current questions and recurring questions which are repeated over time, enabling the study of long-term attitude changes. Many of the datasets are already available in English and those not yet available will be translated on request and free of charge for research, study and teaching purposes. A description of the most recent survey (2016) is available here.

Fun fact: Did you know that Finnish youth appreciate non-material things? Roughly 80% of respondents in the 2016 Finnish Youth Survey considered the opportunity to travel and see the world quite or very important. In a similar vein, respondents valued the possibility to use a considerable amount of their time on their hobbies (80.9%) as well as make environmentally friendly consumer choices (78.2%). Ending up in a managerial position was considered important by 33.2% of respondendents and having your own car by 56.7%.

4. Development Cooperation Surveys

The Development Cooperation Surveys, commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Finland, study citizens' opinions, attitudes and information needs related to development cooperation. The surveys are collected annually since 1997. Some of the data is already available in English and further translations of data can be made on request and free of charge for research, study and teaching purposes. A description of the most recent survey (2016) is available here.

Fun fact: Only 11.4% of the respondents of the Development Cooperation Survey 2016 knew that the country with the most refugees per capita was Lebanon. Nearly 30% of the respondents thought that it was Turkey, approximately 22% assumed that it was Germany, and roughly 11% believed it to be Sweden. Respondents also estimated the amount reserved for Finland’s development cooperation appropriations to be lower than it actually was – about 16% selected the correct answer, which was 820 million euros in 2016. These funds are used, among other activities, for bilateral development cooperation between Finland and its partner countries, to support work done by UN agencies, development banks and as humanitarian aid^[1].

5. Measures of Democracy 1810-2014

Measures of Democracy 1810-2014 is a dataset created by Tatu Vanhanen from the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Tampere. It was compiled based on his long-term research charting political competition, political participation and the index of democratisation in independent states of the world between the years 1810 and 2015. The data is openly available for download for all users without registration. A description of the data is available here.

Read the previous article in the series: "Discover five data sets from our German Service Provider GESIS".

^[1] http://formin.finland.fi/public/default.aspx?contentid=328885&culture=en-US

“The EOSC principles are well aligned with CESSDA’s strategic ambitions and we welcome the opportunity to join the ‘coalition of the doers’”, stated Ron Dekker, Director of CESSDA. “We will be a leading provider of trainings covering the whole research cycle; we will drive innovative technological developments in the field of data science, and build up trust in data archives.”

“CESSDA is currently setting up a social science data platform. Within the ‘coalition of the doers’ of the EOSC, there is much that we can deliver”, Dekker added.

CESSDA will:

1. provide a one-stop shop for search and discovery of datasets relevant to social science research through a joint product and service data catalogue;
2. develop and provide tools for submitting and using data in a safe and secure way;
3. train data owners and data users, including supporting training activities across European Research Infrastructure Consortia (ERIC);
4. contribute to the implementation of FAIR principles – especially with regard to sensitive and confidential data;
5. ensure trusted data repositories – by ensuring the acquirement of seals for data as well as data service organisations (such as the Data Seal of Approval/CoreTrustSeal^[2]);
6. be a hub for our Service Providers and other professional organisations to share expertise and best practices.

On an organisational level, CESSDA is capable and willing to join the Governance Board and working committees, as well as be actively engaged in the annual stakeholder forum. CESSDA will also take part in the EOSC stakeholder engagement event in Brussels on 28-29 November.

^[1] The EOSC Declaration will be published by the end of September by the European Commission.

^[2] The newly articulated assessment framework that arises from the amalgamation of the ICSU WDS and DSA assessment bodies and frameworks. See https://www.coretrustseal.org/.

The German General Social Survey (ALLBUS) collects up-to-date data on attitudes, behaviour, and social structure in Germany. Every two years since 1980 a representative cross section of the population is surveyed using both constant and variable questions. The ALLBUS is made available to interested parties for research and teaching immediately after processing and documentation.

Fun fact: ALLBUS 2016 data shows that 21.7% of people in Germany do not have contact with foreigners, 19.4% feel like foreigners in their own country. Official figures show that 22.5% of the German population are foreigners in 2017.

2. CSES

The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is a collaborative research programme among election study teams from around the world. Participating countries include a common module of survey questions in their post-election studies. Additionally, district level data are reported for each respondent, including electoral returns, turnout, and the number of candidates. Finally, a system or "macro" level data report aggregates electoral returns, electoral rules and formulas, and regime characteristics.

3. ISSP

The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a continuous programme of cross-national collaboration running annual surveys on topics important for the social sciences. It started in 1984 with four founding members - Australia, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States – and has now grown to about 50 member countries from all over the world. The ISSP surveys are designed to serve as replications. Hence, the ISSP offers two powerful research strategies to study societal processes - by combining a cross-time with a cross-national perspective.

Fun fact: Did you know, that almost 60% of people surveyed in 2015 like the amount of work they have and do not want to change it? About one third would even like to work more and thereby increase their earnings. The figures for Russia for example show that in 2015 60% of people surveyed fell into that category, down from 62% in 2005.

4. European Value Study

The European Values Study (EVS) is the most comprehensive research project on human values in Europe. It is a large-scale, cross-national, and longitudinal survey research programme on how Europeans think about family, work, religion, politics and society. Repeated every nine years in an increasing number of countries, the survey provides insights into the ideas, beliefs, preferences, attitudes, values, and opinions of citizens all over Europe since the late 1970s. "Where is Europe heading?" is one of the main questions of the European Values Study (EVS). The last survey was published in 2008 and the next survey is currently underway with new data and insights into the values of the European citizen expected next year.

5. PIAAC

The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) is a worldwide study of cognitive and workplace skills by the OECD in 24 countries. The main aim is to be able to assess the skills of literacy, numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments, and use the collected information to help countries develop ways to further improve these skills.

Fun fact: In the country of Goethe and Schiller the reading competence of German adults is below average. However, the future is looking up as younger German respondents have higher literacy than their elders. While Japan, Finland and The Netherlands lead the charts when it comes to reading competence, Italy and Spain are lagging behind.

At CESSDA, we are working on building a new and improved Products and Services Catalogue (PaSC), as part of a wide-ranging plan to establish a common infrastructure for CESSDA members. For access to the data, PaSC will direct researchers to the source/service where the data may be obtained or analysed. It is due to go into service early 2018 and will be constantly improved.

However, the everyday eating habits of the public at large may tell a different story altogether. Data on our new theme page shed light on the eating habits, diets, and nutrition of Finns as well as their views on food aid and consumer choices relating to food. New data theme pages will continue to be released every month until the conclusion of FSD’s centenary project and the publication of the final centenary theme page entitled Life in a 100-year-old Finland on the eve of Finland’s Independence Day, 5 December.

More information:

• Data on Food
• Data by Theme
• About the Official Finland 100 Programme

See the previous theme of the month: Crime.

Today the Commission established the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) and the European Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Laboratory (ECCSEL ERIC) with statutory seats in Bergen and Trondheim respectively.

CESSDA ERIC aims at providing a distributed and sustainable research infrastructure enabling the research community to conduct high-quality research in the social sciences contributing to the production of effective solutions to the major challenges facing society today and to facilitate teaching and learning. The Commission has supported CESSDA and CESSDA related activities under FP-7 and H2020 for an amount of about 18 Mln EUR. CESSDA entered the ESFRI Roadmap in 2006.

Read the original version on the European Commission DG Research & Innovation website.

The new theme page lists individual datasets and data series suited for research on crime from the perspectives of both victims and offenders. The page features the most recent datasets on the subject as well as some older data selected by the FSD staff.

New theme pages are published around the sixth of each month during 2017. On the eve of the Independence Day, 5 December, a special theme page entitled Life in a 100-year-old Finland will be published. The page will feature data collected in Finland in recent years, illustrating what Finland is currently like and what Finns think about different issues.

More information:

• Data on Crime
• Data by Theme
• Life in a 100-year-old Finland theme pages in the official Finland 100 Programme
• Information Services Manager Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi

See the previous theme of the month: Alcohol and substance use.

A new theme page featuring data on alcohol and substance use has been published on the website of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD). The theme page lists both individual datasets and data series suited for research on the topic.

New theme pages published around the sixth of each month in 2017 are part of FSD's celebration of Finland's 100^th anniversary. On the eve of the Independence Day, 5 December, a special theme page entitled Life in a 100-year-old Finland will be published.

More information:

• Data on Alcohol and Substance Use
• Data by Theme
• About the Official Finland 100 Programme

See the previous theme of the month: Equality and impartiality.

The toolkit is therefore of interest to a wide audience in research data management and digital preservation, and particularly for all European Social Science Data Archives. Elements of the toolkit are likely to be relevant in advocacy to other groups or in supporting broader operational tasks. It was developed within the CESSDA SaW project, which aims to strengthen and widen the CESSDA network.

You can access the toolkit and download any components from here.

It is comprised of:

• A User Guide;
• Three Factsheets (Benefits, Costs, and Return on Investment);
• Four Case Studies from Social Science Data Archives (ADP in Slovenia, FSD in Finland, LiDA in Lithuania, and UKDS in the UK);
• Two Worksheets (the Archive Development Canvas, and the Benefits Summary for a Data Archive);
• A Deliverable Report describing how the toolkit was developed.

In addition, the toolkit describes and links to a number of pre-existing external tools and relevant studies.

Feedback received on the draft toolkit from attendees at the International Digital Curation Conference IDCC 2017 workshop earlier this year included:

"This was one of the most relevant and important workshops I have ever attended in my 14 years of professional experience in this library profession. Since I am interacting with senior stakeholders (e.g. assistant vice-presidents, Deans, Chairs, & associate Deans etc.), cost-benefit and ROI are very important to the development of research data services."

"The worksheets are really useful, and very relevant to be used at an institutional level."

"Highly relevant and good content."

The CESSDA SaW project is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the agreement No.674939. The development of the toolkit was led by Charles Beagrie Ltd, with support from the Slovenian Social Science Data Archive (ADP), the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD), the Lithuanian Social Science Data Archive (LiDA), the University of Tartu in Estonia (UTARTU), and the UK Data Service (UKDS).

Find out more about CESSDA SaW.

Spread the news via Twitter & Facebook.

“Nordic coordination should make it easier to share data, including register data, among themselves. At the same time, we can ensure that we avoid a dilution of the conditions under which researchers are placed. All in all, this should stimulate more cross-border research”, says NSD Associate Director Vigdis Kvalheim.

New EU data protection rules will apply from 25 May 2018 and will impact how personal data may and may not be used for research.

Other headlines from NSD's latest NSDnews newsletter include: "OECD: common laws are not sufficient", "New joint Nordic register", "NORDi: new service for depositing data", "See and be seen - share your data".

Read more in the latest edition of NSDnews.

Read the previous two issues of "NSDnews" in English here.

“We want to offer the users of our services improved tools for finding suitable data, questions and variables,” says Information Services Manager Hannele Keckman-Koivuniemi.

Users can search for data by title, author, keyword, data series, nation, field of study or time period covered by data.

Search results can be narrowed by using various filters, including data type, availability and data file language. Narrowing results by data file language is particularly useful for non-Finnish users who wish to find data already translated into English.

Performing advanced searches is facilitated by an autocomplete feature, which suggests search terms to the user.

The user also receives more information on their search results than before. The search result list displays, for example, data authors, type, time period covered, keywords, data series, and other languages in which the study description is available.

As a result of the new search interface, the front page of the Aila data catalogue has also received a small visual overhaul.

More information:

• Aila Data Service
• Aila Catalogue
• News item from FSDBulletin Issue 47 (1/2017)
• Information Services Manager Hannlele Keckman-Koivuniemi

• Across disciplines, around 80 percent of researchers generally consider the sharing of research data to be very important.
• More than two-thirds of the researchers stated that they had already shared data.
• Data sharing is most common amongst colleagues inside the same institution and within researchers’ broader networks.
• Conditions most cited for sharing data include being informed about the projects that other researchers carry out based on one’s data and the desire to be cited for the use of one’s data by others.
• Re-using quantitative data is much more common than re-using qualitative data.
• There is a large interest in and strong need for additional services and materials in the area of data management, especially for data management planning, data preparation and cleaning, and security, storage and backup.

Click here to consult the report "Data sharing and re-use: Researcher practices, attitudes and needs - FORS survey of social science researchers in Switzerland".

Read the full news item on the FORS website.

Take a look at FORS' Annual Report 2016 to find out more about FORS' core activities, scientific collaborations, publications, facts and figures. The report also includes a note from the FORS director, Professor Georg Lutzon,on linked data for innovative research.

Spread the news on Twitter & Facebook.

Success in achieving equality and impartiality, both in everyday life and in the activities of various institutions, is also studied a great deal in Finland. Several datasets charting equality, impartiality and fairness are available for reuse at the FSD.

Topics include, for example, equality at work, gender equality and equality for people from minority groups. On the theme page you can find the most recently published datasets on the subject, data series as well as recommendations for individual datasets selected by the FSD staff.

The next theme page will be published in May and the FSD’s centenary project culminates in the publication of a theme page entitled "Life in a 100-year-old Finland on the eve of Finland’s Independence Day, 5 December". This page will feature data collected in Finland in 2016 and 2017, which paint a picture of what Finland is currently like and what Finns think about different issues.

More information:

• FSD Data on Equality and Impartiality
• FSD Data by Theme
• In Finnish

Spread the word on Twitter, Facebook & LinkedIn.

• SND became the first Swedish repository to receive Data Seal of Approval certification, proof of devoted staff and users, and an important milestone in SND’s development.
• The Research Policy Bill in November tasked the Research Council with coordinating the work towards open access to research data.

2016 also saw SND begin an extensive collaboration with Swedish universities and other key players to develop a work plan for 2018–2025. The work plan was submitted to the Swedish Research Council early March and describes how SND and collaborating universities will strengthen secure access to high quality research data.

Max Petzold explains that the the proposed "new" SND would be distributed over a number of the largest universities, providing a broad range of national expert knowledge from different research fields and types of research data.

Another important initiative during 2016 was to extend the scope of SND to encompass other disciplines than humanities, social sciences and health sciences. A milestone in this effort was the inclusion of Environment Climate Data Sweden (ECDS) in SND.

"After all the intensive work during 2016, I am convinced that SND and its network of universities are now well prepared to enter the next phase of development towards Open Science" states Max Petzold.

Find out more and download the annual report here.

Spread the news on Twitter.

The FSD also started archiving data with persistent identifiers (PIDs).

The political party agenda database POHTIVA was given a new appearance, with improved search features and a completely new user interface. The new service can also be used effortlessly on mobile devices.

Tietomilli, a service enabling simple analyses and comparisons of public opinion survey data online from ISSP surveys and National Election Studies was completed.

FSD organised several training sessions and seminars throughout the year. Topics of the seminars ranged from research data management to data protection and privacy. Many of the seminars were aimed at the FSD’s "new fields", namely the humanities and health and medical sciences.

In 2016, FSD presented two awards. The Promoter of Data Archiving Award went to the now retired, former director of the Swedish National Data Service and the Danish Data Archive Hans Jørgen Marker, who had a significant role in the development of CESSDA.

Read the full news story here.

Find out more and download the annual report here (in Finnish).

Spread the news on Twitter.

Colleges have invested significantly in sports provision over the past 20 years and the sector has considerable potential to impact on physical activity and health at an institutional and wider community level.

However, there was a lack of information available about the participation levels of students as they progress through college and the factors within the college environment which impact on participation.

Read the full news story here.

For more information visit the SASSI webpage.

Spread the news on Twitter and Facebook.

Our Slovenian Social Science Data Archives - ADP

This year, the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (Arhiv družboslovnih podatkov - ADP) celebrates its 20^th anniversary and will mark the occasion by launching a new website that will be more user friendly and informative, interactively presenting the organisation’s mission and all the services offered. The new website will be launched in April (...)

Our Czech Social Science Data Archive - ČSDA

By the end of 2016, the Czech Social Science Data Archive (ČSDA) was certified with the Data Seal of Approval and 2017 went off to a good start as CSDA received funding for a large research project which will run until the end of 2019. The "ČSDA research" project, funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, is a collaboration between ČSDA and individual researchers from the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, which encompasses ČSDA (...)

The German data archive - GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences

A range of new services and strategies relating to the archiving of social science data are in the process of being rolled out at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany. The BETA version of the data discovery service gesisDataSeach came online earlier this year and is based on up-to-date metadata harvested from social science research data collections worldwide.

The Lithuanian Data Archive for Humanities and Social Sciences - LiDA

The Lithuanian Data Archive for Humanities and Social Sciences (LiDA) is constantly adding new data collections coming from national and international surveys. The addition in recent months of the Lithuanian National Elections Study as well as data from the European Social Survey and International Social Survey Programme conducted in Lithuania are some examples and further acquisitions will be a priority during the coming year (...)

The Slovak Archive of Social Data - SASD

The Slovak Archive of Social Data (SASD) is planning to enhance its data collection by adding some key public opinion surveys from the 1990s which until now have not been archived. These surveys are particularly interesting as they cover a period of political and economic transformation of the country, presenting data on issues such as the split of Czechoslovakia, NATO, EU membership, etc. (...)

The Greek research infrastructure for the social sciences - So.Da.Net

The Greek research infrastructure for the social sciences (So.Da.Net) has obtained further funding as a result of the submission of a research proposal within the framework of the “National Strategy for Research Innovation and Smart Specialization 2014-2020”. The funding will allow SoDaNet to implement its strategy as well as to further meet goals and objectives set by CESSDA; the implementation of the project is about to begin (...)

Stay tuned for further news from across the CESSDA collaboration later this year.

Read the full article here.

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Read the previous news story "The road ahead for CESSDA’s Nordic data archives".

The task of FSD set out in the data policy is to support making research data openly available.

In practice, this entails ensuring long-term access to the archived data and distributing data descriptions to several national and international databases.

"For FSD staff, the fact that FSD is advocated as the primary service for long-term preservation of research data is a welcome aid in our efforts to acquire data produced at our own University and enable their reuse" states Helena Laaksonen, the director of FSD.

The significance of data management plans is also stressed. Researchers should create a plan that includes, among others, a general description of the data as well as details on data collection methods to be used, data storage during the study, anonymisation of the data, long-term preservation or destruction of the data, and intentions to open the data for reuse.

The FSD’s Data Management Guidelines are mentioned as a source of instructions on good data management and anonymisation.

For more information, please consult University of Tampere Publication and Data Policy, the open access web page and the Guide for managing research data.

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Each theme page lists the newest datasets and relevant data series available at FSD.

Visit the data by theme web pages.

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To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

The job is also posted on LinkediN.

The first results of the project are now available online. These include D3.9: Report on findings from re-translation of ELSST terms and their use in the CESSDA Portal reporting the work done by the UK Data Service. The deliverable describes two methods that were used to assess the translation quality of ELSST terms, and is in two parts.

Back-translation

The first part describes the evaluation of a subset of ELSST French and German terms (1000 from each language) using the re-translation (or more precisely, the back-translation) method. The French and German terms were back-translated into the source language (English) and differences between the back-translations and the original source language terms were then analysed. This resulted in a classification of error types, and a number of recommendations. The deliverable shows that, while the back-translation method was useful in highlighting some issues with the thesaurus that affect both its ‘semantic adequacy’ (i.e. how adequate terms are from a semantics point of view) and its ‘formal adequacy’ (i.e. the extent to which terms conform to ELSST Translation Guidelines), it has nothing to say about ‘pragmatic adequacy’ (i.e. how acceptable terms are to users), or how the terms would function in an operational setting. Back-translation should, therefore, be seen as one of several complementary evaluation methods.

ELSST in use

One such complementary evaluation method is to compare the sets of terms that have been used to index the same resources, to see if differences are due to differences in how the terms have been interpreted, indicating unintended ambiguity in either the source or target terms. This approach is explored in the second part of the deliverable which compares the sets of ELSST terms that have been used to index specific cross-national surveys. The original plan was to use the CESSDA portal to find such studies, but this had to be revised since the portal has not been operational for some time. Instead, CESSDA-ELSST partners were asked via a questionnaire how they index a set of cross-national surveys. Many thanks to all who responded. Differences in the sets of terms assigned to each survey were then analysed. Results showed that, due to the paucity of the data and the differences in indexing practices across archives, it was not possible to draw any firm conclusions on the quality of the translation. However, the work highlighted ways in which ELSST could be better exploited within the archives.

Next steps

The results of the evaluation work described above will feed into ongoing work on HASSET and ELSST within the CESSDA-ELSST project, and into the next goals of the SERISS project. SERISS goals in the next phase (to June 2017) include updating the ELSST translation guidelines and producing the next deliverable: D3.10 ‘Best practice document on translation and use of thesaurus terms’. This work will be produced in consultation with CESSDA-ELSST partners.

Related SERISS work

Complementary work within SERISS is looking at how to improve the translation quality of the questionnaires in cross-national surveys. Different approaches to questionnaire translation are being investigated, including how computational linguistic methods could be exploited. A workshop on this last topic is planned in the near future.

Feedback

If you have any comments on this blog, please either add them below, or send them to the UK Data Service Thesaurus Team at thesaurus@ukdataservice.ac.uk

Lorna Balkan

With 20 years of expertise in preserving and sharing research data, ADP champions data quality assurance, sustainable data use and open data initiatives. Recognising the gap between research interests and proposed changes in data protection legislation, ADP called for action, reviewing the current research practices, safeguarding standards and ethics policies.

The new regulation raises several questions that need to be acknowledged in the research community. These pertain to the need to strengthen the rights of research participants, enhance the responsibilities and duties of research institutions, as well as stress the role of consent forms.

Dr. Sonja Bezjak, ADP, facilitated a round table discussion with the following participants:

• Dr. Meta Dobnikar, Head of Science Division, Slovenian Ministry of Education, Science and Sport
• Peter Pavlin, Head of Penal Legislation and Human Rights Division, Slovenian Ministry of Justice
• Dr. Brina Malnar, Research Associate, Public Opinion and Mass Communication Research Centre, Faculty of Social Sciences, member of ethical committee
• Dr. Grega Repovš, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, member of ethical committee
• Dr. Franc Mali, Professor at Centre for Social Studies of Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, member of ethical committee
• Dr. Janez Štebe, Head of the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives.

Mr Pavlin was the negotiator for Slovenia on the EU General Data Protection Regulation (EUGDPR) with the EU Institutions. He explained the process of adopting the new regulation and addressed persisting issues and dilemmas.

Some of the main take-away messages of the round table were the following. The EUGDPR contains special provisions on processing of personal data for health purposes as well as for historical, statistical and scientific research purposes. Furthermore, it gives member states a mandate to grant research interests a special status and to allow them guarantees within the scope of data protection. However, following Article 6 “Lawfulness of processing”, member states may also introduce additional conditions to processing personal data, which in turn might pose challenges for scientific research¹.

Mr. Pavlin drew attention to Article 25 “Data protection by design and by default”, where he argued that there was a lack of clarity on the stated provisions for scientific research. He also pointed out that Article 17 “Right to erasure (´right to be forgotten´)” might be in conflict with freedom of speech. Slovenia has recently had to deal with several affairs related to freedom of speech in the arts and politics (e.g. Udba.net affair). Mr. Pavlin stated that retaining information for scientific interest may therefore be problematic.

Research communities across the member states should monitor the implementation process as well as communicate their research interest in order to protect it. The regulation will enter into force in May 2018, giving the research community in all member states a fairly short time slot to voice their concerns and adapt to its requirements.

According to Mr. Pavlin, EU members are likely to face several challenges when adopting the new regulation. Although it contains many compromises and provides possible solutions, a number of ambiguities remain. For example, there are rising concerns in Slovenia that the new regulation could result in the lowering of human rights standards already in place.

The round table discussion resulted in the proposal to set up a working group, gathering researchers and other relevant stakeholders. The aim of the group would be to protect research interests by actively engaging in the implementation process at a national level as well as by raising awareness of the importance of scientific research to society.

A full report on the round table is available in Slovenian on the ADP blog website. For more information in English please contact: Arhiv.podatkov@fdv.uni-lj.si.

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¹ _{Regulation (EU) 2016/679 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32016R0679}

In light of the event CESSDA would like to highlight the network of social science data archives across the world.

You can search for data using the our members' online catalogues:

• Czech Republic: Social Science Data Archive
• Denmark: Danish Data Archive
• Finland: Finnish Social Science Data Archive
• France: PROGEDO
• Germany: GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
• Lithuania: Lithuanian Humanities and Social Science data archive
• Netherlands: DANS
• Norway: Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD)
• Slovenia: Social Science Data Archive
• Sweden: Swedish National Data Service
• Switzerland: Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences
• United Kingdom: UK Data Service

Other Data Services

• Ireland: Irish Social Science Data Archive
• Italy: UniData

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Bjørn Henrichsen, Chair of the Board of Directors: “This is a very important appointment for CESSDA as Ron brings with him invaluable expertise, and key insight into the open science agenda. He has a solid background in European science and innovation as well as a large international network in the field. I am confident that he will take CESSDA to the next level”.

Ron Dekker studied econometrics and started his career in labour market research at Maastricht University. In 1995 he moved to Tilburg University where his research focus shifted to data management. This was his starting point at the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), where in 1997 he became the head of the Data Agency and then in 2007, Director of Institutes.

In 2013 he was seconded to SURF, the Dutch IT-innovation organisation for Higher Education & Research, as acting director and in 2014 he was seconded to the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture as Project Leader Open Science in preparation for the Dutch EU Presidency in the first half of 2016.

He then moved to Brussels to work as a Seconded National Expert on Open Science at the European Commission, Directorate-General Research & Innovation.

Ron takes up the position of Director of CESSDA on 1 March 2017.

"CESSDA is a major infrastructure in Europe recognised as an ESFRI Landmark based in Bergen, Norway”, states Ron Dekker. "The field of research is undergoing major transformations. We are entering the era of open science, which is about a systemic change in the way science is performed and with more focus on data-driven research. CESSDA needs to be at the forefront of this change. I will ensure that CESSDA is the go-to partner on re-use of data in Europe and beyond.”

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During the project, FSD will focus on meeting the requirements set by CESSDA as well as actively taking part in development work within the research infrastructure.

FSD aims to have an active role in designing the services that CESSDA will offer to European researchers in the future and to ensure that FSD’s services are in line with international standards.

Find out more (in Finnish).

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In that light, a collaboration in terms of communications with the current four ERICs in the SSH (CLARIN, DARIAH, ESS, SHARE) was established in order to create synergies and draw on each others' strengths. Two additional partners joined the initiative, CLARIAH and PARTHENOS.

The aim is to promote and improve the visibility of social science and humanities research in Europe.

Four changes have recently happened on the CESSDA website:

The homepage presents a news section specially for the other research infrastructure partners in the communications collaboration. The news items are selected on a regular basis by the communications staff of the organisations taking part in the collaboration.

The most recent tweet from the shared Twitter list as well as a link to the list itself is visible on the homepage. The list is made up of the seven organisations which are a part of the communications collaboration (DARIAH, CESSDA, CLARIAH, CLARIN, ESS, PARTHENOS and SHARE).

A webpage has been created to present the communications collaboration in more detail, with information about the organisations and related communications staff; it can be found under "Resources".

CESSDA currently has three blogs which it promotes: CESSDA Training Blog, Data Impact Blog and the ELSST Blog. The most recent blog posts are now visible from the homepage.

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A growing number of students and researchers are discovering the advantages of reusing data. In 2016, as many as 1,020 registered users downloaded data from the data service portal Aila (2015: 802).

In addition, open access data, which do not require registration, were downloaded by 397 persons. Use of information services provided by the FSD also grew. Overall, the data service portal now has some 2,800 registered users.

Find out more on the FSD website.

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Compare with the 2015 figures here.

Read the full press release and buy the book here.

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Helena Laaksonen received her Master's degree in Sociology from the University of Tampere. She has worked for the FSD since 2002, and as an information officer and deputy director since 2004. She has also served just under two years as acting director.

Before joining the data archive, she worked as a researcher in sociology in several research projects at the University of Tampere, and at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research in Germany.

"We will continue on our chosen path here at the Data Archive, together", states Helena Laaksonen when outlining her vision for the future.

"The FSD is in good shape right now, but the field of research data services is continuously evolving. One must keep up with development, and preferably have an impact on it too."

She also points out that e-infrastructures require constant updating and maintenance: "For that to be possible, both external funding and collaboration between national and international actors are essential".

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“This call in itself, which is directed at the social sciences, is one of the many positive results of the Big Data Europe project, in which CESSDA is a proud partner”, stated Ivana Ilijašić Veršić (CESSDA), domain leader for the social sciences in Big Data Europe. “We are only just over half way through the project and this call encourages us to continue to work on big data issues in the future”, she added.

Big Data Europe (BDE) is a Coordination- and Support Action (CSA) funded in the H2020 programme, which has been running since 2015 and runs until the end of 2017. Its main objective is to raise awareness about the potential in regards to economic and societal benefits that can are provided by efficient big data management. Outreach activities regarding big data are organised in all of the seven societal challenges identified by the European Commission.

CESSDA leads work on the sixth societal challenge, SC6, “Europe in a changing world - inclusive, innovative and reflective societies”, which is all about social sciences and digital humanities. Two workshops have already taken place since the start of the project as well as three webinars, including one on the general data protection regulation and another on citizens’ budget at a municipal level.

“The main technical achievement this year has been the launch of the the open source Big Data Europe Platform”, stated Martin Kaltenböck, technical lead for all seven SC in BDE is Semantic Web Company (SWC).

“We believe that the platform lowers the barrier to entry for new big data users and scientists from different domains, enabling them to experiment with a variety of big data tools in a plug and play fashion. It’s fun – try it!” said Ronald Siebes from Vreij Universiteit Amsterdam, one of the architects of the platform.

Some examples of what the platform can do is to classify traffic conditions and make predictions, ingest and process data streams from wind farms to enhance condition monitoring, or detect geo-located events in news sites and social media and show the correlation of such events with changes detected by comparing Earth Observation satellite images (such as the construction or destruction of settlements). In the social sciences, the pilot shows open budget and budget execution data from three different cities in a homogeneous way so that they can be analysed, compared and visualised.

As the year draws to a close, CESSDA and SWC are investigating a possible future collaboration to keep up the good work and continue to engage the social science disciplines in the big data era.

Find out about the call “Policy-development in the age of big data: data-driven policy-making, policy-modelling and policy-implementation” (deadline 02.02.2017).

Find out more about CESSDA’s contribution to BigDataEurope here.

Read the press release about the BigDataEurope Platform and the flyer.

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RDJ contains data papers: scholarly publications of medium length (with a maximum of 2500 words) containing a description of a dataset and putting the data in a research context. Social science researchers who produce, archive and reuse research data are welcome to publish a data paper. As the journal is e-only and constantly being updated, papers can be submitted any time.

Peter Doorn (DANS): “The Research Data Journal will give researchers more credit for publishing data sets and provides an additional way to cite them via peer-reviewed articles.”

Louise Corti (UKDS): “RDJ contributes to transparency of research, accelerates dissemination and fosters reuse of scholarly data.”

How it works

Before publication a data paper is assessed by peer reviewers and data specialists. They will give feedback to the author and indicate the necessary improvements for acceptance. DANS is founder of RDJ and is responsible for the Editorial Board for the Humanities Section. For the Social Sciences Section, the Editorial Board is coordinated by the UK Data Service. For sub-fields specific Editorial Boards will be set up.

Data papers receive a persistent identifier (DOI). The author, usually also the data depositor, will receive publication credits. Datasets that underpin the submitted data papers should be formally published in a trusted digital archive or repository.

Have a glance at the papers here.

RDJ is published by Brill in collaboration with DANS.

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The group split its discussions on running training courses into the following two areas: data discovery (search strategies and techniques for finding and reusing data, which are important for the researcher’s own research) and research data management and data management plans (which are now stipulated in the course of the application for funds as part of Horizon 2020 and other funding programmes).

Research data management activities

The research data management session revolved around a specific task of the CESSDA 2017 Work Plan, a planned fifteen hour online data management training course with the objective of supporting researchers in:

“Acquiring the knowledge and skills (essentials) to reuse already existing data and store, manage, archive and share their research data according to the best practices in the field and complying with Open Research Data requirements.”

In this light, participants learned about the Essentials 4 Data Support (E4DS) introductory course offered by Research Data Netherlands. In addition to an online-only version, this course is also taught as a blended-learning course: mostly online but comprising two face-to-face meetings and lasting six weeks with an estimated workload of 35 hours (plus the face-to-face meetings). It addresses people who support researchers in a range of activities from storing to archiving and sharing their research data.

Its planning and visual elements were presented in more detail and lessons learned shared with all participants. Having a clear structure of the course in advance and to make one person responsible per chapter in the course were both recommendations from E4DS. Other recommendations included to design and enforce a style guide and decide early on future access and reuse rights to the course contents.

The CESSDA data management course is also introductory, with little prerequisite data management knowledge or skills expected, and with the aim of raising data (management) awareness; it is primarily targeted at social science researchers but will apply to other disciplines as well. The content of the training will be in line with Horizon2020 requirements.

A matrix of data management topics was discussed as well as data types (quantitative and qualitative data, GIS, social media, and audiovisual as well as different combinations of these types). Topics considered essential for the online course were data management planning, ethics and legal (rights, licensing, data protection, informed consent, anonymisation), quality and organisation of work, including versions of the data, documentation and metadata, storage, backup, security, as well as publishing and sharing data outside the project team and data citation.

The course will also be accompanied by guidance and additional resources targeted at trainers who want to offer face-to-face training for researchers in their own organisations.

A leading partner was designated for each topic and descriptions will be added by the end of January 2017. Several phases ensue, defining online content in several chapters, the content templates and creation workflow, as well as creating online content, the web interface and visual tools. After a period where the course will be tested both by online users and as part of face to face workshops, the online content and workshop guidance materials for trainers will be finalised by the end of 2017, with the course to be offered from early 2018.

CESSDA activities in data discovery

Training for data discovery is a new area for CESSDA and aims to help users locate and navigate existing data collections relevant to their own research/teaching interests, data collections that may be stored in different locations and subject to different access conditions.

The data discovery session began with information sharing between archives with members presenting the current training plans of the Czech Social Science Data Service (CSDA), Danish Data Archive (DDA), German Data Archive for the Social Sciences (GESIS), Irish Social Science Data Archive (ISSDA), Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP), Swedish National Data Service (SND) and the UK Data Service (UKDS).

Preliminary findings from the survey carried out by Jen Buckley (UKDS) entitled “CESSDA Training Needs Assessment” were presented. This assessment of training needs from social science data archives from both CESSDA member countries and non-members constituted an important first step for CESSDA’s data discovery work. The results gave insight into the topics and areas of training that are most essential to data users and to gaps in current training provision.

Subsequently, participants discussed potential topics and areas of training and agreed that the focus should be on supporting users to find and access data, to evaluate data for secondary data analysis and to explore quantitative microdata, especially complex data structures. Important considerations to be taken into account when planning and delivering training were brought up, including format, software, language and resources.

The remainder of the meeting focused on developing the future data discovery training programme. In 2017, CESSDA Service Providers will collaborate to deliver three workshops in three different locations on three different topics: migration, political behaviour, and the European Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS).

Led by either GESIS or the UK Data Service in partnership with other national archives, each workshop will utilise expertise within the network of CESSDA Service Providers. The individual workshops will highlight data available in different locations and increase understanding of complicated datasets and their potential. The aim is that the three workshops combined will widen the user base of CESSDA data among post graduate and senior researchers throughout Europe.

The UK Data Service will also lead on three webinars on data discovery: one general, one on political behaviour and one relating to ageing.

Members of the CESSDA Training Group will also collaborate to share and disseminate useful resources for data discovery through the CESSDA website.

The session ended with ideas for 2018 and beyond to be finalised into a work plan at the next meeting in January 2017. However, for the time being, the focus is likely to be on webinars and online tutorials.

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This article was prepared by CESSDA Training Group members Jonas Recker from GESIS and Jen Buckley from UKDS, as well as Eleanor Smith from CESSDA.

This new combination of DSA and WDS implies some changes as compared with the previous requirements of the DSA, however, these are not of a fundamental nature. The DSA/WDS remains a basic certification standard for “Trustworthy Digital Repositories”, based on a self-assessment of these requirements by the repository itself that is peer-reviewed by external reviewers. Instead of sixteen guidelines there are now sixteen requirements to assess the trustworthiness of a repository.

A number of the requirements are particularly relevant for the CESSDA Research Infrastructure and a couple are briefly described here.

The first requirement, the mission, remains: “The repository has an explicit mission to provide access to and preserve data in its domain”. This clearly is the essential point of a trustworthy digital repository.

The fourth requirement demands that the repository ensures “that data are created, curated, accessed, and used in compliance with disciplinary and ethical norms”. The repository should back this up by providing evidence, such as: “Are procedures in place to review disclosure risk in data, and to take the necessary steps to either anonymize files or to provide access in a secure way? Are staff trained in the management of data with disclosure risk?”.

The fifth requirement is concerned with organisational infrastructure and states: “The repository has adequate funding and sufficient numbers of qualified staff managed through a clear system of governance to effectively carry out the mission.” This is measured by the archive’s ability to provide evidence to support the following for example: “The repository is hosted by a recognized institution (ensuring long-term stability and sustainability) appropriate to its Designated Community. The repository has sufficient funding, including staff resources, IT resources, and a budget for attending meetings when necessary. Ideally this should be for a three- to five-year period.”

What has this to do with CESSDA?

Seven of the fifteen CESSDA Service Providers (which represent the member countries) have already achieved this certification. Ultimately, all CESSDA Service Providers should be certified. The bulk of this work is currently being carried out in the CESSDA SaW project, which comes to an end in summer 2017. Furthermore, one of the core activities of the CESSDA Trust Support Group, one of CESSDA’s four working groups, is to have “an active role in assisting all SPs (including those of aspiring members) in acquiring and prolonging the DSA certification and complying to the CESSDA obligations”.

To this effect, a first training workshop on the new requirements was held on 16-17 June 2016 in The Hague as part of the first CESSDA SaW workshop in which a timescale and procedure were set out by which DSA/WDS compliance should be reached within a year’s time (a summary of the workshop is available here). A second workshop is planned for 1-2 March 2017 in Zagreb, again in the context of the CESSDA SaW project. At this workshop, the results of the first versions of the self-assessments of the Service Providers will be discussed, followed up by further training, if necessary.

It is of crucial importance that CESSDA Service Providers are considered as trusted bodies by universities, national statistical offices, funders, researchers and other relevant stakeholders. CESSDA itself should also be recognised as an entirely reliable partner both in handling, delivering and preserving data. Furthermore, certification of all CESSDA service providers would also serve CESSDA internally, as it would allow them to work more effectively on joint projects and data exchange in an environment built on mutual trust.

This citation, taken from the DSA and WDS document An Introduction to the Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements released alongside the joint press release mentioned above, expresses the importance of certification and relates equally to all stakeholders:

“National and international funders are increasingly likely to mandate open data and data management policies that call for the long-term storage and accessibility of data. If we want to be able to share data, we need to store them in a trustworthy data repository. (...)

Sustainability of repositories raises a number of challenging issues in different areas: organizational, technical, financial, legal, etc. Certification can be an important contribution to ensuring the reliability and durability of data repositories and hence the potential for sharing data over a long period of time. By becoming certified, repositories can demonstrate to both their users and their funders that an independent authority has evaluated them and endorsed their trustworthiness.”

By ensuring that all of its Service Providers are certified, CESSDA as a whole can be regarded as a trustworthy research infrastructure.

See the joint DSA-WDS press release here.

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This story was prepared by the CESSDA Trust Support Group leader, Heiko Tjalsma from DANS, and Eleanor Smith from CESSDA.

Both editions of 2016 are now available in English.

The main topic of NSDnews 1/2016 is NORDi (Norwegian Open Research Data Infrastructure), a major NSD project aiming at rebuilding the infrastructure for research data in Norway on the basis of the Open Access principle, thus making it easier to find, use and share research data. A staff member from NSD's Privacy Protection Section also explains how the EU's new privacy protection decree will benefit researchers.

NSDnews 2/2016 focuses on the European Social Survey (ESS) and the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), in both of which NSD is deeply involved. Furthermore, the head of NSD’s Section for Higher Education and Research Statistics presents open access as an academic publishing requirement.

NSD is the national archive for research data in Norway, providing data to researchers and students in Norway and abroad. It is also a resource centre assisting researchers with regard to data gathering, data analysis, and issues of methodology, privacy and research ethics.

Read more about NSD here.

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To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

See the announcement on the PROGEDO website (in French).

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CharmStats Pro is for those large study researchers or survey teams who want to quickly and easily create and preserve the recoding or harmonization syntax as part of a codebook.

Find out more on the CESSDA Training Blog.

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To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

Our Norwegian data archive - NSD

Last autumn, NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data was granted a new large-scale infrastructure project by the Norwegian Research Council, NORDi (Norwegian Open Research Data Infrastructure) to modernise and strengthen NSD as a national research data archive and point of access for data and training services. Much of NSD’s work will therefore concentrate on NORDi in the coming months and years (...)

Our Swedish data archive - SND

After Hans Jørgen Marker, the former director of SND (Swedish National Data Service) stepped down in July 2015 and was later presented the Promoter of Data Archiving Award in April this year, Max Petzold was appointed as the new director of SND on 1 November 2015 for a three year period, while also retaining his position of professor of biostatistics at the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg. For the years to come, SND intends to actively support the university archives, libraries and IT services via courses and consultancy work (...)

Our Finnish data archive - FSD

Autumn began at FSD with a couple of seminars in Tampere on 14 and 15 September: “Data Protection - Seminar for humanists” and “Seminar on Data Reuse and Aila Data Service” (in Finnish). These seminars presented good opportunities to communicate about the archive’s activities and services with specific target audiences. FSD is also participating in several national research conferences where it will promote its activities via a range of communication channels (...)

Our Danish data archive - DDA

In Denmark the National Archives – of which the Danish Data Archive (DDA) is a part – collects research data in accordance with the Danish Archives Act. In practice this has not been implemented consistently until recently. However, universities are now to be subject to the same regulation as the public research institutions, given that they are both seen as part of the public sector and thereby subject to the Archives Act (...)

Stay tuned for further news from across the CESSDA collaboration in the new year.

Read the full article here.

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In order to realise its technical vision, CESSDA will lay solid foundations for its Research Infrastructure, and the Technical Workplan does that by introducing a number of building blocks (in the form of guidance documents and software environments). These can then be used by CESSDA’s Service Providers and others to help them develop and deliver high quality components into the technical Research Infrastructure.

One of the key objectives of the Technical Workplan is to ensure CESSDA has access to its software assets (namely the source code, configuration files and technical documentation that underpin its software-based products and services) and also develops and retains the capability to maintain, enhance, quality assure and run them. To this end, the programme of the Expert Seminar was a combination of theoretical and hands-on sessions, giving both a broad introduction to how CESSDA will manage the production of software components for its Research Infrastructure, and an in-depth look at some of the tools that have been adopted to support the development of components. Micro-service architectures, cloud computing, software maturity modelling and Continuous Delivery were amongst the topics discussed, as these are important enablers for achieving the technical vision.

As John Shepherdson, leader of CESSDA’s Technical Group told the participants during the wrap up session “success depends on us all working together to embrace and improve the guidance documents and development environments”.

There were twenty five participants, representing twelve different Service Providers and CESSDA Main Office, plus one member in waiting and two observers from EU projects with a shared interest in technical infrastructure.

Feedback from attendees was positive, with the majority of respondents rating the event overall as ‘excellent’.

In the next few months, the Technical Workplan will deliver improvements to our infrastructure for Continuous Deployment, continue the conversation with Service Providers and others via meetings and conference presentations (including one on extending CESSDA’s Software Maturity Matrix to the DDI Domain at EDDI16) and revise and reissue the Technical Architecture document.

Consult the presentations from the seminar here.

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Find out more about the DDI Community here.

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Find out more and register for the webinar on the Big Data Europe website.

Visit the Big Data Europe website to find out more about the project.

We are also delighted to announce that our Swiss colleagues at FORS have completely reviewed and consistently applied all diacritics to their French translations.

Finally, each preferred term (PT) and its translations have a link to their equivalent SKOS Concept.

Details on the types of changes made since the previous release January 2015 can be found on Changes to ELSST.

Jeannine Beeken

Applications are being accepted after the official deadline.

To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

Tuija Kössö is studying Health Care Engineering at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, TAMK. She got acquainted with the services of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) and Aila Data Service, maintained by the data archive, during a research methods course held by Tapio Yrjölä. Tuija Kössö found the data downloaded from Aila also useful for planning her own Bachelor's thesis. Analysing the questionnaire used in the Family Barometer study gave her tips for the questionnaire design of her own research.

Use of social media as research data is on the rise as the number of social media users increase. However, the scientific community has only recently begun to consider the methods and procedures of analysing and archiving social media data. The greatest barriers to archiving data include the commercial nature of social media services and their terms of service that, at least for now, usually prevent archiving. Social media data is proving to be part of valuable digital cultural heritage. Examining such data can reveal much about communication culture in the 2000s, social networks, information sharing and many other phenomena related to society and human behavior.

Read more in the latest issue of the FSD Bulletin.

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This is a closed event for European Data Archives that are CESSDA members, observers and aspiring members (cf. National Data Services). Members of EU Horizon 2020 projects that CESSDA is participating in and aim to deliver components into the CESSDA Research Infrastructure as part of the project may apply and can attend if space permits (cf. CESSDA’s projects).

For more on this event please visit the events page.

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Four presenters contributed to this session:

• Vigdis Kvalheim, Chair of the session & Deputy director at NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data, and work package leader in CESSDA SaW,
• Ivana Ilijasic Versic, Acting Administrative Director, CESSDA AS, and partner in Big Data Europe,
• Elena Sommer, SERISS Coordination team, ESS (European Social Survey),
• Mari Kleemola, Development Manager, FSD (Finnish Social Science Data Archive).

The chair of the session presented a quick overview of CESSDA’s history, showing how CESSDA has evolved over time from an informal group of European social science data archives to the current established research infrastructure recognised as one of the Landmarks Research Infrastructures in the ESFRI 2016 Roadmap. CESSDA is currently made up of fifteen member countries and one observer, with many other countries actively working towards membership.

The chair then introduced the three ongoing Horizon 2020 projects in which CESSDA is involved and which were subsequently presented:

• CESSDA SaW - Strengthening and widening the European infrastructure for social science data archives
• Big Data Europe - Empowering Communities with Data Technologies
• SERISS - Synergies for Europe's Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences

as well as the internal CESSDA project on metadata management led by FSD, the Finnish data archive, from the CESSDA consortium.

Two other presentations of CESSDA’s activities were made during the IASSIST16 conference:

• “Maturity Model for Assessing Data Infrastructures – CESSDA as an Example”, by Mike Priddy (DANS), Trond Kvamme (NSD), Maarten Hoogerwerf (DANS) and Marion Wittenberg (DANS) drawing from the CESSDA SaW project, during the “Data Services: Setting up and evaluating” session on 1 June.
• “CESSDA Research Infrastructure – Technical Framework”, by John Shepherdson (UKDA/UKDS), during the “Technical Data Infrastructure Framework” session on the same day.

Read more about IASSIST16.

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The CMM project is part of the CESSDA Work Plan 2015, having started in November 2015 and running until April 2017, led by the FSD and including seven additional partners within CESSDA (ADP, CASD, DDA, GESIS, NSD, SND, and UKDS).

The objective of the CMM project is to develop a standardised metadata design and practice for CESSDA. The outcome will be a Metadata Standards Portfolio that will support resource discovery and question banks. The Portfolio will be compliant with the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) international standard for describing statistical and social science data and will include a core metadata model and controlled vocabularies for relevant metadata fields.

It goes without saying that without good metadata, the data assets held by the CESSDA Service Providers would be meaningless characters. Metadata are the basis for CESSDA’s core services, such as the Product and Service Catalogue. The Catalogue can only be as good as the metadata behind it - if the metadata are poor, the Catalogue cannot make them better; without adequate and standardised metadata, the Catalogue cannot function as intended.

The next steps involve a project working meeting taking place during the EDDI16 event in Cologne in December, as well as a Portfolio published in April 2017 (including the core metadata model and controlled vocabularies) which CESSDA Service Providers will have commented on earlier in the year, as well as an impact analysis published in April 2017.

Read the full report, CESSDA Service Providers' Metadata Practices, here.

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The delivery partners were DANS, GESIS, NSD, SND, UKDS (lead), with all partners contributing to the Technical Architecture document and UKDS and NSD responsible for specifying, installing and configuring the components of the development infrastructure.

The Development Infrastructure is already in use, as the Open Source Metadata Harvester (a deliverable of the Metadata Harvester project) was developed with it. However, there is much more to do, as there are no acceptance or production environments at present. This means that software components can be developed, but CESSDA has no way of formally testing and accepting them into service, nor of running them so that they are made accessible to users. Also, discussions with Service Providers to make them aware of the detailed guidance contained in the Technical Architecture and gather their feedback are needed. It is anticipated that funding will be made available from the CESSDA budget to complete this additional work.

Once this work has been completed, there will be clear guidelines and formal acceptance criteria to ensure software components for the Research Infrastructure can be designed, built and tested to comply with common standards and required quality levels. This will enable CESSDA to provide a full scale sustainable research infrastructure that enables the research community to conduct high-quality research, which in turn leads to effective solutions to the major challenges facing society.

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Find out more about the CESSDA Technical Group here.

Read the full summary and see the presentation slides on the Big Data Europe website.

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Read the previous news piece on the webinar here.

Visit the Big Data Europe website to find out more about the project.

The primary ambition is to establish the conditions for, and initiate the movement towards, a seamless social science data archive service for the whole of the European Research Area (ERA), which is capable of supporting the research needs of the next generation of social scientists wherever in Europe they may be, or beyond.

Find out more about the project here: http://cessdasaw.eu

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is CESSDA’s new Chief Technical Officer, in charge of managing the technology strategy and implementation of the Research Infrastructure.

is CESSDA’s new Senior Project Manager, responsible for managing European projects and internal work plan tasks.

Read the full press release here.

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Here is a first snapshot of what is at IASSIST2016 and why it is important.

Part 1: Data Sharing, New Data Sources and Data Protection

Read the blog post on the IASSIST iBlog.

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Part 2: Data Infrastructure, Data Processing and Research Data Management

Read the blog post on the IASSIST iBlog.

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To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

With regard to this, CESSDA held a workshop on PID within CESSDA. The workshop took place on 18-19 February 2016 at GESIS in Cologne, Germany.

The workshop aimed to set the stage for developing a joint CESSDA PID Policy, which not only contributes to the cooperation and exchange of data between the different research institutes active in the social sciences, but also facilitates the access to data for data users all over Europe. The workshop also served as a platform to discuss the results of work carried out in recent months on the use of PID by GESIS, as well as to provide an overview of the general status quo concerning the use of PID within CESSDA.

Read the full article here.

Consult the agenda and the presentations from the workshop here.

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Trust in digital repositories has been an important topic for CESSDA for some time. As CESSDA Service Providers all maintain trustworthy digital repositories in one way or another, they should not only have trust in each other, but also present themselves as trustworthy to their external partners. These include researchers, funders, national statistical offices and government agencies.

In 2014, it was decided that it would be mandatory for all CESSDA Service Providers to achieve DSA-compliancy. DSA stands for Data Seal of Approval, the basic form of certification forTrusted Digital Repositories.

A number of CESSDA repositories have already effectively achieved this status and others are working towards it. During the seminar, common challenges experienced in reaching the DSA-compliancy were discussed. A clear outcome from the discussions was that it would be helpful to offer mutual guidance on the matter. A possible CESSDA Trust Working Group in which all Service Providers are represented was deemed to be helpful. This group could then be supported by an expert group, which would give advice and review certification assessments. Subsequently, in December 2015, four CESSDA Working Groups were adopted, one of which focuses on trust issues, the CESSDA Trust Support Group.

An issue that needs further discussion and exploration is how the obligations in the Annex to the CESSDA Statutes can be fully accomplished by its Service Providers. These obligations are covered for an important part by the DSA certification guidelines. A small number, however, are not, and how these points should be worked out in a harmonised way for CESSDA was the subject of debate during the seminar.

The seminar was attended by fourteen representatives from different CESSDA Service Providers all over Europe. As both senior and junior staff members were present, experiences and insights were shared among all. All in all it was a very useful meeting for the further development of trust within CESSDA. The work will also be continued in the CESSDA SaW project.

The presentations are available here.

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CESSDA is one of the five ESFRI Landmarks in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) RIs which had already been identified on the previous three roadmaps (2006, 2008 and 2012). By the time that the 2016 ESFRI Roadmap was published, all of these RIs had become legal entities, a status which CESSDA acquired in 2013.

"In the last ten years since the first roadmap was published, CESSDA has progressed to an ESFRI Landmark. This is a huge success for our data services in the social sciences as it demonstrates their increasing maturity in terms of working together for improving the conditions for research in the highly important field of social and cultural innovation", said Bjørn Henrichsen, Chair of the Board of Directors of CESSDA.

"For the future, the ESFRI Landmarks will require continued support so that they can upgrade to reach an optimal level of operation which is in line with their full potential", he added. "At CESSDA, we are aiming high in terms of the results which we envisage to deliver over the coming years, not least via key European Horizon2020 projects such as CESSDA SaW and SERISS which will both strengthen collaboration and maximise our impact", Henrichsen concluded.

The ESFRI Roadmap 2016 can be downloaded here.

Read the SERISS project press release here.

Read about CESSDA SaW here.

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Today, NSD is one of the world’s largest research data archives; headquartered in Bergen, and employing almost 100 staff members.

Leading Norwegian social scientists spearheaded efforts to create a research data archive, resulting in the establishment of NSD in 1971. Until 2003 it was affiliated with the Research Council of Norway, and has since been a limited company wholly owned by the Ministry of Education and Research.

NSD archives, organises and disseminates data to national and international research groups as well as Norwegian authorities. Highly skilled ICT personnel develop technical solutions for production, curation, access and analysis of data.

NSD is a national centre of expertise in privacy protection issues and acts as data protection official for around 140 Norwegian research institutions. NSD also organises Norway’s national School Election Project.

“If we think of knowledge and research as ‘the new petroleum’, then we might call research data the ‘crude oil’. Access to data is becoming ever more important for researchers, and NSD is based on the fundamental value that research data are a common good. Therefore, the principles of open access, equal treatment and sharing of research data have always permeated NSD, and will continue to do so”, says Bjørn Henrichsen.

Read the press release in Norwegian:

NSD får nytt navn (01.03.16)

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Contacts:

Bjørn Henrichsen (Director)
+47-55 58 21 18
bjorn.henrichsen@nsd.no

Vigdis Kvalheim (Associate Director)
+47-55 58 33 88
vigdis.kvalheim@nsd.no

Njord V. Svendsen (Communications Officer)
+47-932 83 777
njord.svendsen@nsd.no

Compared to 2014, the number of datasets downloaded grew by 60%, reaching 2,200 by the end of the year and over 800 registered users downloaded data. In addition, open access data which do not require prior registration for their access were downloaded by 360 persons.

The most popular quantitative dataset was Measures of Democracy 1810-2012 which can be downloaded without being registered on the portal. The data focuses on political competition, political participation and the index of democratisation in all independent nations.

Access the full CESSDA Press Release here.

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We can start off with drawing attention to the CESSDA Workshop on Persistent Identification which will take place on 18-19 February 2016 in Cologne, Germany, hosted by CESSDA Service Provider GESIS, as well as the IASSIST2016, the world’s largest conference on information technology and data services for research in the social sciences, which will be held in Bergen from 31 May to 3 June 2016.

CESSDA Service Providers

DANS
04 February 2016, Amsterdam: Netherlands Research Integrity Network (NRIN)
17-18 February 2016, Berlin: Open Science Days 2016, focus topic CITIZEN SCIENCE
22-25 February 2016, Amsterdam: 11th International Digital Curation Conference
24-28 April 2016, Venice: eKNOW 2016 - The Eighth International Conference on Information, Process, and Knowledge Management

GESIS
15 February-04 March 2016: 45^th GESIS Spring Seminar: Multivariate Analysis of Panel Data, Cologne, Germany
The GESIS Spring Seminar comprises three training courses for social scientists interested in advanced techniques of data analysis and in the application of these techniques to data.
04-26 August 2016 in Cologne: GESIS Summer School in Survey Methodology (registration will be open on this website in February)

SND
22-25 February 2016: 11^th International Digital Curation Conference
26-27 April 2016: Mötesplats Open Access 2016

FORS
13-15 July 2016: 3rd International ESS Conference - Understanding key challenges for European societies in the 21st century

UKDS
From a series of webinars:
03 February 2016, online: 14.00 - 15.00: Webinar: An introduction to data on Information and Communication Technologies
04 February 2016, online: 15.00 - 16.00: Webinar: Key issues in reusing data
11 February 2016, online: 15.00 - 16.00: Webinar: Data Management basics
18 February 2016, online: 15.00 - 16.00: Webinar: Key data: UK and cross-national surveys
09 March 2016, online: 15.00 - 16.00: Webinar: Finding and accessing data in the UK Data Service

Events:
05 February 2016, University of Essex: Oral History for Public Culture CHASE-ESRC training course
07 March 2016, MRS, London: Can Big Data replace the Census? What does Big Data give us now?
14 April 2016, Essex Business School: DevCon 2016 - a system developers' conference for the University of Essex community
01-12 August 2016, Trieste, Italy: The CODATA-RDA School of Research Data Science Summer School (smr 2876) (external event)

European Projects

CESSDA SaW

A workshop will take place in Budapest in October 2016 (tbc) relating to the CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and widening the European infrastructure for social science data archives) project (more news to come soon)*.

SEEDS

The SEEDS (South-Eastern European Data Services) project is aimed to help establish data services in three West Balkan countries (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Serbia). It involves intensive training, organisation building, development of technical infrastructure, and promotion and outreach activities.

09-11 February 2016, Second SEEDS workshop will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia (for SEEDS partners only)

09 February 2016, online, 9 am Pacific / 10 am Mountain / 11am Central / 12 noon Eastern: DataOne Webinar: Empowering Earth Science Communities to Share Data Through Guided Metadata Improvement

FOSTER

The FOSTER-CESSDA training project, which is part of the FOSTER initiative, supports European researchers in implementing sustainable data management and sharing concepts in their projects by offering training and resources on these topics. The FOSTER project aims to set in place sustainable mechanisms for EU researchers to FOSTER OPEN SCIENCE in their daily workflow.

The project draws attention to the following upcoming events for instance (and many more):

02 February 2016: MARES Conference, Open Science Training Workshop
23 February 2016: IDCC16: FOSTER Portal Demonstration
17-22 April 2016: EGU2016: Open Science Goes GEO
28-29 July 2016: ESOF2016: "Research & society" Marie Curie Actions satellite event

Consult the whole list of training events here.

Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive.

* This information was updated on 11 March.

We learnt that data work required multiple skills, from technical to business market, meaning that they are rarely in the same person and that teamwork was therefore very important in a company to design and implement technologies. Gabriella Cattaneo, from IDC’s European Government Consulting unit explained that there were different data worker profiles. “Data workers” were defined as people who collect, store, manage and/or analyze, interpret and visualize data as their primary or as a relevant part of their activity”.

Read the full article on the Big Data Europe website.

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Read the previous article on Big data: A technological industry perspective and some case studies from medical devices and smart cities to city transport planning.

Visit the EDF2015 website.

Read the full article on the Big Data Europe website.

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Read the previous article on The European dimension of big data revealed at EDF2015.

Visit the EDF2015 website.

The next speaker in the opening session of day two was Günther H. Oettinger, European Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society, who highlighted that we are in the middle of the fourth industrial revolution which will have a profound impact on our lives.

Read the full article on the Big Data Europe website.

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Visit the EDF2015 website.

SHARE, the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, whose first wave of data was collected in 2004, is the first study to examine the different ways in which people aged 50 and older live in twenty European countries from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean and in Israel.

Ever since the first wave, SHARE has published a book presenting the first results from every new wave. Each book has a title which relates to contemporary social challenges faced by European societies.

CESSDA was invited to attend the event and subsequently prepared an article presenting some of the key findings from the Wave 5 of SHARE.

Read the full article here.

See the agenda here.

See the previous news item from the day of the launch here.

To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

To find out more about the position and how to apply, please see here.

Population ageing is a secular challenge which will strain the fabric of Europe’s societies.

Read the full press release here.

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Keep your eyes open for a summary of the event in the coming days.

The seminar is targeted at CESSDA Service Provider staff members both early on in their careers as well as to those who have experience in the field.

For more on this event please visit the events page.

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* This sentence was removed on 20.11.15: "A number of subsidised places are available for attending this seminar, covering travel and subsistence costs."

The primary ambition of this project is to establish the conditions for a seamless social science data archive service for the whole of the European Research Area, capable of supporting the research needs of the next generation of social scientists wherever they may be.

Access the full CESSDA Press Release here.

Spread the news on Twitter.

CESSDA also launched a new Twitter account on the day of the kick-off meeting so follow us to stay up-to-date!

Watch the short video interviews from the launch:

• Ivana Versic explaining the role of CESSDA in SERISS

"Social sciences and social scientists are at the heart of addressing all major challenges in Europe today. To the greatest extent and with the fewest constraints as possible, all scientific data which is publicly funded should be open. Finally, our archives should be future proof.”

• Brian Kleiner on WP4 "Interactive tools for cross-national surveys"

“Even the most well-resourced international surveys are still often working with very basic tools. WP4 of SERISS is entirely devoted to the extension and improvement of existing tools that should ultimately help make data and metadata production and delivery quicker and more effective, thus better serving the scientific community.” (Brian Kleiner, FORS)

• Sebastian Netscher on WP5 "Training and Dissemination"

“We will develop a set of tools like an online management platform or a questionnaire design and development tool. To ensure that the research community can use these tools, and that researchers benefit from the SERISS project, we will provide a series of trainings, training materials, guidelines and manuals. We will also investigate data management trainings, taking new forms of data, like social media data, into account and the challenges in regard to legal, ethical and quality issues.” (Sebastian Netscher, GESIS)

• Vigdis Kvalheim on WP6 "New forms of data: legal, ethical and quality matters"

“SERISS comes at a time when the digital revolution has resulted in a mass increase in data types and sources potentially available for social survey research, such as social media data, transactional data, administrative data and not least also data from biobanks. Clearly data from these sources have a huge potential to enrich the more traditional survey data and thus make social service more robust and strengthening its productive and explanatory power.” (Vigdis Kvalheim, NSD)

Lastly, Vigdis Kvalheim sums up the project in a few words:

“The overall purpose is to prepare the social sciences for the future, that is making sure that the social sciences, including the network of CESSDA archives, are well-equiped and able to use these data in a qualified and efficient way and in line with the data protection framework. So it’s all about preparing the social sciences for the future."

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Find out more about SERISS.

The primary goal of data research in social sciences is to facilitate more and wider use of high quality microdata in social, economic and political research and in turn, their ability to improve our understanding of ongoing societal processes, the problems involved and the solutions available.

Read the full article on the Big Data Europe website.

Read more about the BDE project and CESSDA's role in it here.

At the launch of the project in London, Director of the European Social Survey European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ESS ERIC) and SERISS Coordinator, Rory Fitzgerald said: “This grant provides a significant boost for European social science. Whether it is an ageing society, climate change, fertility, migration or the future of democracy, the social sciences are critically important in illuminating those issues. By facilitating more effective harmonisation and innovation between social scientists, SERISS will help to ensure they can effectively play their part in those debates.”

"SERISS will develop synergies between existing infrastructures and thus address the key challenge of fragmentation in the social sciences. Furthermore, it will tackle controversial new forms of data such as social media or administrative data from a legal, ethical and qualitative perspective, thus ensuring that the social sciences play an active part in preparing society for the use of new data technologies" (Ivana Ilijasic Versic, Acting Administrative Manager, CESSDA AS).

Download the full press release on the SERISS website.

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Read more about SERISS here.

This year is also an anniversary for NSD, the Norwegian research data archive, which has been organising national school elections since 1989. This year was the fifteenth edition of the school elections, taking place from 1 to 8 September.

Access the full CESSDA Press Release here.

Spread the news on Twitter (NSD, in Norwegian) and Twitter (CESSDA, in English).

*Title changed on 18 September 2015. Initial title: Will the vote today turn out like the school elections?

Access the full CESSDA Press Release here.

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They can be summarised as follows:

1. The Regulation should safeguard the interests of patients in medical research.
2. The Regulation should maintain the distinction between use of personal data for ‘historical, statistical or scientific purposes’ and data processing which is potentially harmful to data subjects.
3. Harmonised rules for research at EU level would be preferable to promote trans-national research collaboration.
4. The Council’s approach, which provides derogations to Member States with respect to consent for historical, scientific, and statistical research, should be maintained to avoid negative effects on research.

Read the recommendations in full here.

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Read more about the Day of Action here.

Following the Day of Action on Data for Health and Science on 16 June 2015 in Brussels, led by BBMRI-ERIC (Biobanks and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure), and before the trialogue between the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union on 24 June, CESSDA along with other key research organisations signed a joint statement by the Wellcome Trust.

Personal data provide a vital resource for health and other scientific research to benefit society and save and improve the lives of patients. It is essential that the European institutions find a compromise position that enables vital research to continue under the Data Protection Regulation.

Read about the Day of Action here.

Read the editorial in Nature "Data overprotection - Draft European rules governing privacy threaten to hamper medical research" (23 June 2015).

Share the editorial on twitter.

The new CESSDA website…

The homepage has a clean layout, presenting information in a clear and structured way. The top horizontal navigation bar presents where to find more information on CESSDA. Images and boxes have been chosen to catch the eye and make the information easier to access from the homepage.

The homepage is laid out so that all the content appears on the viewer’s screen, thus eliminating the need for scrolling. The entire website is scalable so that it can be viewed on different devices, from desktop computers to smaller devices such as iPads or smartphones.

As part of CESSDA's new communication strategy, five target audiences for the different outputs of CESSDA have been identified. They are policy makers, data experts, the research community, data producers, and the general public.

They can be defined as follows:

• Policy makers: ministers, EU and national parliamentarians, European Commission officials, ministries in potential new member countries, relevant press offices
• Data experts: from its internal organs (Board of Directors, Service Providers, General Assembly, Scientific Advisory Board), Funding Councils, specialised media, other European Research Infrastructures, other European projects, other networks and multinational surveys
• Data producers: National Statistical Institutes, Eurostat
• Research Community: researchers, students, journals, student papers
• General public: lay people with an interest in CESSDA’s findings, generalist media

An interactive, modernised map has been created to present information on CESSDA’s member countries, observers and other data services in Europe that are outside of its membership. Information boxes appear when the mouse goes over a particular country, and there is a structured presentation for each country on available data services (e.g. Norway).

CESSDA offers a range of different services to its members and target audiences. CESSDA services break down into projects, media and resources, presenting information in a structured way which is easy to navigate. A main resource is the Data Catalogue, which represents a virtual common catalogue for the collective data holdings of the various CESSDA member archives. CESSDA Training promotes research data management and data curation in the social sciences.

About the website producers

The graphic profile is produced by RMM & Goosen Design, based in Bergen, Norway. Programming and web solution delivered by Open Concept, based in Kjøllefjord, Norway.

Read more:

Read the GESIS press release.

Read more about Dr. Alexia Katsinadou here.

Click here to find out more about the position.

Important notice: this position has now been filled (March 2016).

Enrollment is limited to 25 participants. Registration is available through the ICPSR Summer Programme website.
For more information, contact the ICPSR Summer Programme at sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu or +1 (734) 763-7400.

The map also displays the European infrastructures that are established as ERIC - European Research Infrastructure Consortium. Ten ERICs had been adopted by the Commission by the end of 2014. Eight of them are part of the ESFRI roadmap.

See the online map here.

The conference website is: http://ipres2015.org

iPRES is a series of conferences on digital preservation. Since 2004, iPRES conferences have been held on three continents. Read more here.

Follow iPRES2015 on Twitter.

BigDataEurope was launched on 27 February 2015 in Brussels.

More information on BigDataEurope.

Read the full press release here.

Designed to address the needs of social science researchers, this course considers ways to maintain the security and integrity of research data for re-use and long-term preservation.

2) First steps towards digital preservation: 22-23 April 2015

The workshop is intended as an introduction to digital preservation. It presents central concepts of digital preservation and provides the participants with a common terminology to understand an (idealised) preservation and dissemination workflow.

Read more about CESSDA Training here.

• Good Data Battle in Slovenia, Sonja Bezjak
• Curating Qualitative Data, Libby Bishop
• Ensuring Research Integrity, Sharon Bolton, Kay Eastuagh
• Harnessing User Expertise, Jack Kneeshaw
• Quality, Lifecycles and Trust, Herve L'HoursP
• Technical Support for Quality, John Payne, Matthew Brumpton
• Enhancing Metadata Quality, Lucy Bell

The following paper is also available for download: Re-using qualitative data: a little evidence, on-going issues and modest reflections, Libby Bishop, University of Essex, Studia Socjologiczne 2014, 3 (2014), ISSN 0039-3371

The focus of the workshop was be ‘Ensuring research integrity’.

Read more here.

*This article was updated in March 2016.

On 12 March 2014 the European Parliament voted in favour of the European Commission's data protection reform. The negotiating mandate/legislative reform that now has been adopted by the European Parliament does not involve dramatic consequences for research. However, amendments to the EU Commission's proposal have been made that may have negative consequences for parts of the research sector.

It is written by Vigdis Kvalheim and Trond Kvamme from NSD - Norwegian Centre for Research Data. The survey questionnaire was designed collaboratively by the IFDO Board, and the web survey was administered and implemented by the Odum Institute.

Read more and download the factsheet here.

Download the full report here.