DANS Open Day 2026

DataverseNL supports institutions in publishing and managing research data, including the option to define data retention periods. In practice, retention is not only a technical setting. It raises questions about policy, responsibilities and long-term availability.
This workshop consists of three parts:

• First, we briefly introduce DataverseNL and clarify its scope, including how it differs from the Data Stations.
• Second, we show how retention periods can be configured in DataverseNL and what options exist around deaccessioning, deletion and continued metadata visibility. Participants will then explore a demo environment themselves through a short “treasure hunt” aimed at discovering specific functionality in practice.
• Third, we open the discussion to learn how retention questions are approached in different contexts. How are retention periods determined? Is there a policy in place, or is it handled case by case? What does deletion mean in practice?

The aim is to connect what DataverseNL offers with how institutions deal with the question of data retention and to identify topics that may need further discussion and/or actions.

Social Sciences is one of the largest research fields in the Netherlands with faculties at every Dutch universities and various institutes who together produce a lot of data that is of interest to the field.
To make these datasets findable, DANS has been involved in the development of the ODISSEI Portal: the place to discover social science datasets in the Netherlands.

You can search through more than 10.000 datasets within one integrated interface. Instead of visiting every university or institute that hosts social science data separately, all information is visible and harmonised within one interface. The portal automatically harvests social sciences datasets from all universities affiliated with DataverseNL – the Dutch network, and the ambition is to provide full coverage of all available data.

This session is especially for institutes that hold social sciences data but are not yet included in the portal. In this session, we will present the ODISSEI Portal and explain how providers can onboard their data collections and showcase how the portal improves data findable in the portal itself as well as towards international data aggregators.

Most research-performing organisations have a data, research data management, or open science policy. Did you ever consider making the policy itself as FAIR as possible? Bring your own organisational policy to this workshop and consider which aspects you could improve to practice what you (and we at DANS) preach. We briefly introduce a checklist with which the participants will then work on their own policy.
The workshop targets data professionals and data policy officers. We also welcome participants bringing draft policies.

Workshop leads Maaike and Marjan have co-developed the checklist in the FAIRsFAIR project, where 20 international policymakers from research-performing organisations and funders were supported in making their policy more FAIR.

Software and Infrastructure are changing over time. How can we ensure your data is still accessible and manageable when the software that created the repository is no longer in use? We will discuss the dilemma’s that arise from this concerning context free information transference and how the DANS Data Vault handles this to provide long-term access to the data.

This service is used by DataverseNL and the DANS Data Stations and is also offered to other organisations to preserve their research data for the long term.

DANS provides Data Stations for depositing research data and aims for high FAIR qualities through guidelines and curation actions, including file format recommendations. This is one aspect of DANS in which it has always been involved with Research Data Management and Digital Preservation alike. These two areas can sometimes exist entirely apart from one another and especially in regards to preferred formats policies and guidelines, it should benefit people working in either realm to be aware of roles and responsibilities; efforts and initiatives; options and possibilities. The curation workflow at DANS will be discussed with emphasis on file format issues; actors within the process and the overall goal in mind to enable the cycle of scientific research.

Making sensitive data FAIR is one of the biggest current challenges: While sensitive data are often highly interesting for researchers to reuse, the data need to remain safe and require special infrastructure to facilitate protected storage and responsible reuse. To date, although solutions for analysis (e.g. SANE) and local storage exist, there is no central infrastructure for sensitive data that can cover the full life cycle, from collection to (meta)data publishing and reuse.

In this session, we invite Joep Bos-Coenraad (project leader and developer at PEP) to present PEP, a responsible data sharing repository developed at Radboud University, specifically designed to protect and share sensitive data. PEP is already in use at the Radboud university and investigations have started to make PEP more widely available at other institutes, making it a promising solution for storing and managing sensitive data.

We will discuss the potential and possibilities of connecting PEP with the DANS repository services to provide an integrated infrastructure that does span the whole life cycle: PEP provides a solution for secure storage and access management, and the DANS repositories cover the (meta)data publishing and data discovery.