Highlights from last year’s collaborations with CESSDA

The Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) was established in 1976, bringing together national data archives in the social sciences across Europe. In 2017, CESSDA received the status of an ERIC – a European Research Infrastructure Consortium – and now comprises 23 member countries. CESSDA’s mission is to promote social science research results and support national and international research and cooperation. CESSDA offers tools for data discovery, metadata and vocabulary standards, as well as advice and training.  

DANS has been with CESSDA since its establishment in 1976, back when DANS was still the Steinmetz Archive. DANS, as the Dutch Service Provider of CESSDA, helps drive developments within CESSDA projects and working groups while learning from the available expertise of other archives in the consortium.    

Collaboration in European Projects 

CESSDA does not only work on internal projects within the consortium but has also been a trusted partner in various European and international projects and a central part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) since it started. CESSDA, together with other ERICs in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH), has been building the SSH part of the European Open Science Cloud (SSHOC-EU). Through the SSHOC-EU project, DANS participated in developments that improved the European SSH infrastructure including our Dataverse software. The international collaboration amongst the SSH ERICs has been an inspiration for the Dutch SSHOC-NL project, bringing together the social sciences and humanities national infrastructures (ODISSEI and CLARIAH) to collaborate on central challenges that cross both domains. DANS is a partner of both ODISSEI and CLARIAH as well.  

One of the flagship projects of DANS, FAIR-IMPACT, also involved CESSDA as a partner and significantly improved the European FAIR data landscape. This news item summarizes the project’s achievements from the CESSDA perspective.  

Services for the community 

CESSDA provides multiple services for the research community, all focused on making social science research data easily accessible and (re)-usable. 

Discovering social science data 

The CESSDA Data Catalogue brings data from the partnered data archives together and presents them in a single catalogue. The metadata is harmonised according to the CESSDA Metadata Model, and harvested by European aggregators to make the metadata even more widely available. The metadata from the DANS Data Station Social Sciences Humanities (SSH) is available in the CESSDA catalogue. DANS and CESSDA are talking about including the metadata we collect in the ODISSEI Portal, bringing together social sciences metadata from various Dutch data providers, in the CESSDA service as well. This would make more Dutch social sciences datasets visible within this European infrastructure.  

Interoperability across data providers  

CESSDA also provides metadata standards and vocabularies for the community, which are crucial for the interoperability of the data and metadata available across Europe. The DANS Data Station SSH, for instance, includes the European Language Social Sciences Thesaurus (ELSST) and CESSDA topic classification, both managed by CESSDA. CESSDA also offers a vocabulary service which includes a set of vocabularies from the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI), an important standard in the social science community.  

A network full of knowledge 

Through CESSDA, DANS can tap into the knowledge of 22 other social sciences data archives situated across Europe. Common challenges that archives face, for instance around dealing with sensitive data, are discussed within dedicated working groups. In the past year, CESSDA successfully addressed numerous challenges with the working groups, of which we are highlighting a few examples.  

Supporting trustworthy repositories 

One of the pillars of CESSDA is trust. The Trust and Landscape working group therefore focuses on supporting the TRUST principles (Transparency, Responsibility, User focus, Sustainability, Technology) within the archives. This working group, which DANS has been a member of for many years, supports data archives to become certified with CoreTrustSeal (CTS). CTS is seen as an important certification standard, which DANS has also received for their Data Station SSH and Archaeology. Within CESSDA, archives have the possibility to exchange thoughts about the challenges they perceive in the certification process and share new, important developments. Every year, the group publishes a landscape report, which provides a great overview of ongoing developments. While the full report is only available to the consortium, a brief was published for a wider audience.  

Training for repositories and their users 

The knowledge that exists within the CESSDA archives comes together in the training activities and materials the consortium provides. The Data Management Expert Guide (DMEG), which was developed under the lead of DANS, is a widely used resource to introduce scholars to research data management. The Data Archiving Guide (DAG), to which DANS has contributed from the start as well, provides information for data archives, bringing together the knowledge from various European archives and providing concrete examples of best practices and available policies. Both tools are available free of charge and under an open license.  

Advancing Dataverse  

Many of the CESSDA archives make use of Dataverse, the open source software that DANS uses for the Data Stations and DataverseNL. Within the Dataverse working group, which is co-led by DANS, CESSDA archives working with Dataverse exchange best practices and discuss collaboration possibilities to improve the software. In funded projects like SSHOC-EU, DANS – as linked party of CESSDA – has been able to provide crucial Dataverse developments like the Controlled Vocabulary support.  

Proper Data Citation  

Too often, datasets are still not cited correctly, leading to missed attribution and an underestimation of the impact the datasets available at DANS and other archives have. The CESSDA Data Citation working group addressed this problem by releasing a report on the importance of proper data citation. DANS contributed to this report by providing information about our citation guidelines and practices. 

Outlook towards the future 

CESSDA has a central role in the social sciences data landscape in Europe and influences the work of national data archives in various ways. Their services and networks are designed to support the proper management of data, to ensure valuable data can be shared and reused. Therefore, CESSDA’s ambitions directly align with the core mission of DANS to make data available for reuse. The standards CESSDA develops and maintains help us at DANS to harmonize the available data and metadata in the Netherlands. DANS will continue to follow new recommendations and standards of CESSDA as they are being developed to ensure Dutch data remain interoperable and integrated into the European data infrastructure.  

The certification of data archives remains high on the agenda and will continue to be an important task in the coming years, to maintain the trustworthiness of archives. In this context, DANS and CESSDA are collaborating in the EOSC-FIDELIS project which aims to establish a network of healthy, vibrant and self-sustaining trustworthy digital repositories (TDRs). 

On top of new developments: advancing artificial intelligence.  

An important development for research data management is the advancement of artificial intelligence. AI tools can support data curation practices, but also bring various  challenges that archives need to address. CESSDA has established a special task force on artificial intelligence, which DANS has joined as an observer, bringing data archives together to exchange experiences and define policies. 

Celebrating 50 Years – CESSDA conference in June 

To celebrate its 50-year anniversary in 2026, CESSDA plans a conference in Bergen, Norway – where the main office of CESSDA is located. The four-day conference in June will be an opportunity for scientific and policy voices to exchange, strengthen synergies, and set the course for a future-ready European Research Area, including developments around AI. DANS will definitely be there, and we hope to see many of our national and international colleagues there as well!