On 25 March, it will be one year since Researchdata.se was launched as Sweden’s national research data portal. The portal is designed to increase the visibility of research data from all academic disciplines and serves as a resource for researchers who want to find, share and reuse research data.
Researchdata.se was created on the initiative of SND and is one of our most important and extensive initiatives in recent years. We are very proud of our newly turned one-year-old and are working intensively to develop the portal even further. Since its launch, several new resources have been added and a number of existing services have been improved. Examples include:
- Guidance on managing personal data in research
- Support for publishing scientific code
- Improved filters in the search function for the research data catalogue
- The ability to see the principal investigator directly in the search results
- A function for ordering research data included in a collection.
Data descriptions from several new sources
The research data catalogue harvests metadata from several different repositories and portals in order to provide a comprehensive overview of available Swedish research data. Some of the sources added over the past year are:
- FEGA Sweden
- KTH Data Repository
- Mid Sweden University (MIUN) Zenodo
- RAÄ Runverket Zenodo
- Stockholm University Library Dataverse
- Mälardalen University Zenodo (currently no published datasets)
- University of Gävle Zenodo (currently no published datasets)
- Dalarna University Zenodo (currently no published datasets)
All datasets published in these newly added sources are included in Researchdata.se, in the same way as data described in and published through SND’s DORIS.
As part of the work to expand the research data catalogue, SND has also developed a guide to establishing Zenodo communities for higher education institutions and other organizations who wish to do so.
“We want to show how a Zenodo community can be used by higher education institutions to collect, highlight and keep track of datasets and other materials, such as presentations, reports, and articles. A collection can be used to inventory what is being produced at an institution, and there are also opportunities to curate metadata for material already available on Zenodo,” says Olof Olsson, IT Architect at SND.
What are visitors to Researchdata.se most interested in?
The datasets generating the highest number of visits on Researchdata.se reflect a broad range of subjects and several research fields. The three most visited datasets during the portal’s first year are:
- SCANIA Component X Dataset: A Real-World Multivariate Time Series Dataset for Predictive Maintenance
- DiACL - Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics
- a multi-stain breast cancer histological whole-slide-image data set from routine diagnostics for computational pathology
The statistics for the information pages on Researchdata.se indicate that users are looking for practical support in organizing, describing and making research data accessible. There is particularly strong interest in questions relating to folder structure, file naming and versioning, which shows how important it is with clearly defined working methods when several people are collaborating on the same project. Pages on data management plans and the FAIR principles are also well visited, pointing to a need for guidance both in planning data management and in making data more accessible and reusable.
The next step
Looking ahead, the goal is to continue developing Researchdata.se together with our partner organizations and the SND Network. We also hope that more national research infrastructures will want to collaborate in various ways. In the near term, planned developments include improving site search, adding a function for previewing data files, and enhancing the ability to harvest and search collections. Researchdata.se is also intended to form part of Sweden’s EOSC node, if the application for this initiative is approved.
SND has also recently invited the research data support functions at higher education institutions and our partner organizations to join a network for communication and outreach work, with an initial focus on creating a shared calendar and news function at Researchdata.se.
We are very grateful for all the work that has been done and for the constructive feedback we have received from users and our partners over the past year. We look forward to seeing at least as much interest and commitment around Researchdata.se in the years to come!