RDM Tools and Services
Many Swiss Higher Education institutions offer dedicated support services for Research Data Management (RDM). These services are often located at institutions’ libraries and may or may not be linked to research data repositories.
Typical support activities include (but are not limited to):
- Support with Data Management Planning
- RDM training for researchers
- Initial consultations on legal and ethical issues related to RDM
Individual Research Data support units are not listed here but are easily accessible online.
RDM infrastructures, services & tools
DaSCH (Swiss National Data & Service Center for the Humanities) provides a FAIR long-term repository and a generic virtual research environment for open research data in the humanities in Switzerland and provides trainings and advice for research data management. The DaSCH is the coordinating institution and representative of Switzerland in the European Research Infrastructure Consortium ‘Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities’ (DARIAH ERIC).
DLCM (Data Life-Cycle Management) is a swissuniversities-funded project that offers a range of infrastructures, tools and services for Research Data Management. DLCM offers training and consulting expertise (in collaboration with partners across Switzerland), as well as advice and guidance around ELN and LIMS.
FORS is the Swiss center of expertise in the social sciences, offering support around data collection and analysis, data management, and a research data repository.
The DMP Canvas Generator aims at helping researchers in the life sciences generate Data Management Plans for SNSF funded projects.
The Cost Calculator for Data Management, developed by the EPFL Library, helps researchers to calculate costs for their RDM.
openRDM.swiss offers support for openBis, an Open Source Electronic Lab Notebook and Research Data Management system.
openBIS is an active research data management system that combines a data management and an inventory system with an electronic lab notebook. openBIS was developed by the Scientific IT Services at ETH.
SWITCH provides IT infrastructure and services for Swiss education and research such as (cloud) storage and file sending solutions.
The goal of DMLaw Tool (Data Management Law Tool) is to guide researchers through the most relevant legal issues in research data management.
SWITCHlegal provides legal consulting with a focus on ICT law such as, licensing law, data protection law, telecommunication law, intellectual property rights, procurement law.
c4science is an infrastructure for scientific code co-creation, curation, sharing and testing. C4science is available to the entire Swiss universities community and accessible to external collaborators.
Centro Svizzero di Calcolo Scientifico is a Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, operated by ETH Zurich, located in Lugano, that offers also a PID service for scientific data.
The Swiss Data Science Center is a joint venture between EPFL and ETH Zurich to support academic and industrial projects in the use of data science and machine learning techniques.
There are several repositories operated in Switzerland. For more details check this list.
The Swiss DOI Desk at ETH Zurich registers DOIs for primary data (research data) and for secondary data such as working papers, articles or doctoral theses.
The Swiss PID service is a service for creating Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), offered by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).
c4science is an infrastructure for scientific code co-creation, curation, sharing and testing. C4science is available to the entire Swiss universities community and accessible to external collaborators.
Materials Cloud enables the seamless sharing and dissemination of resources in computational materials science, offering educational, research, and archiving tools, simulation software and services, curated and raw data.
FDM-Dienstleistungen & -Hilfsmittel
Viele schweizerische Bildungseinrichtungen bieten Zugang zu diversen Dienstleistungen rund um Forschungsdaten und Forschungsdatenmanagement. Häufig sind diese Dienstleistungen bei den Bibliotheken der Bildungseinrichtungen angesiedelt. Forschungsdatenrepositorien werden von den Institutionen selbst oder von Trägerorganisationen betrieben.
Zudem sind in den letzten Jahren institutionsübergreifende Dienstleistungen und Hilfsmittel im Rahmen von diversen Projekten entstanden.
Research data repositories
At the end of the research process, research data repositories are used for data publication and archiving.
Repositories are information infrastructures in which digital research data are stored in an organized manner together with structured metadata and other context information and made accessible as permanently as possible. Interested third parties can find and access the data — or, in the case of access restrictions, at least their metadata— through the interfaces of the repositories or web search engines. The data provided, may allow for research results to be reproduced and verified and for follow-up projects to be realized.
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) lists on its website some repositories that meet the SNSF Open Research Data (ORD) criteria. Following we have compiled some further examples of repositories used in Switzerland. The list is not exhaustive.
Institutional repositories
BORIS Portal is the institutional research data repository of Bern University. It is part of the current research information system (CRIS) of this institution, which also contains information on research projects and researchers.
ACOUA (Academic Output Archive) is the institutional archive for long-term preservation of research data and code produced by EPFL.
ETH Zurich Research Collection is the Repository for Publications and Research Data of ETH Zurich.
yareta.ch is a cantonal research data repository operated since June 2019 for all Geneva’s Higher Education Institutions (HEI).
Discipline-specific repositiories
EnviDat is the environmental data portal and repository developed by the Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL. The portal provides unified and managed access to environmental monitoring and research data.
Eric-Open is the FAIR and open research data repository of Eawag, the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.
DaSCH (Swiss National Data & Service Center for the Humanities) operates a FAIR long-term repository and a generic virtual research environment for open research data in the humanities in Switzerland.
The Language Repository of Switzerland (LaRS) is a national platform for the publication of linguistic research data. LaRS uses SWISSUbase as its repository system.
For data in social science, SWISSUbase is operated by FORS, the Swiss Center of Expertise in the Social Sciences.
Interdisciplinary repositories
OLOS.swiss is a national long-term repository for research data that was launched in 2020. OLOS was developed in the context of the DLCM project.
SWISSUbase is a national cross-disciplinary research data repository for Swiss universities and other research organisations in need of local institutional data repositories. Researchers can register their research projects, as well as store and share their data.
Additional research data repositories which operate in Switzerland (in some cases with international partners) can be found at re3data.
Furthermore for open governmantal data, Switzerland offers opendata.swiss which makes, open governmental data available to the general public in a central catalogue. It is a joint project of the Confederation, cantons, communes and other organizations with a mandate from the state.
Am Ende des Forschungsprozesses sollen Forschungsdaten (oder im Falle von Zugriffsbeschränkungen mindestens ihre Metadaten) öffentlich publiziert und archiviert werden. In der Schweiz existieren diverse institutionelle, wie euch fachspezifische Repositorien, die diesem Zweck dienen.