Data expertise

Our expertise, built up in national and European projects, is reflected in the following expert services of DANS, intended for researchers, research institutions, research funders, data professionals and other archives, to help with (background information about) the sustainable storage and sharing of data.

FAIR and Open data

Make and keep your research data FAIR.

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Research Data Management

Manage all versions of your data efficiently and securely.

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Certification of digital archives

Meet the requirements for digital archives.

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Monitoring and analysis

DANS analyses information about the data landscape and makes this information available, which serves as a basis for data policy.

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Together with others

DANS is active in many projects and infrastructures.

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DANS Fellowship

DANS shares knowledge through the DANS Fellowship programme.

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Training and Outreach

Interactive knowledge exchange about research data

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Consultancy

Customised advice by the data experts of DANS.

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Tools

Online resources for working with research data.

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FAIR and Open data

Research funders require that your data are maximally available and suitable for reuse and reproduction of research. In other words: data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).

The data experts at DANS know what FAIR means in various disciplines and can help you to make and keep research data FAIR. This is how we make research and researchers more visible together.

Research Data Management

Where do you store data during and after your research, who is allowed to access it and when, and what are you going to document and archive? In a data management plan (DMP), you describe these and other steps to efficiently and safely manage all versions of your data.

DANS does not require a DMP, but is glad to help you plan the subsequent archiving in time. We are pleased to share DANS’ experience in writing and reviewing DMPs for international projects and research financiers.

Certification of digital archives

DANS helps heritage institutions that want to start with the certification of their digital archive. Together with the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE), a guide for the certification of digital archives was developed (Wegwijzer Certificering). DANS manages the Dutch website with information on setting up and performing a certification procedure.

The knowledge and experience that DANS has in the area of certification for digital archives is also shared in webinars, training courses and projects.  

Monitoring and analysis

DANS collects, analyses and presents quantitative information on data repositories, FAIR data practices and the state of Open Science in the Netherlands. Comparisons are also made with other countries. This knowledge is shared through reports, seminars and workshops.

DANS Fellowship

DANS actively seeks cooperation with external experts and offers the possibility of a DANS fellowship. This is a long-term collaboration related to a concrete project in the field of long-term archiving. New knowledge from this programme is shared through events such as webinars and presentations.

Together with others

DANS participates in national and international projects and infrastructures. Together with our collaborating partners, we contribute to sustainable access to research data. 

Training and Outreach

We are happy to share our knowledge with researchers, data professionals, research institutions, research funders and other repositories. We regularly organise interactive workshops on data publishing, archiving, reusability and interoperability. The developments in the field of Open Science, research data management planning and tools are also addressed.

In addition, DANS organises successful interactive training courses together with others, such as: RDNL Essentials 4 Data Support, RDNL AVG and develops training materials such as the DANS Data Game and CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide. 

Consultancy

With consultancy and project-based support, DANS helps to improve permanent access to digital research data. Our data experts have extensive experience within various scientific disciplines and have advised parties such as Erasmus University Rotterdam, NWO and the European Commission and Science Europe.

We offer advice and support on: embedding data management more firmly within your organisation, the rules and developments regarding Open Access and the sharing of research data, assistance in implementing and assessing data management plans, tools to assess the FAIRness or reusability of data and obtaining a CoreTrustSeal certificate.

Tools

DANS shares expertise and experience in the form of practical tools and resources, such as FAIR-Aware and Text Fabric.

Text Fabric: file format, data model, API and apps for processing texts and related annotations. It is used for some significant (old) tekst corpora for which Jupyter notebook tutorials are available.

FAIR-Aware was developed by DANS under the umbrella of the FAIRsFAIR project. It helps researchers to become more aware of the FAIR data principles and learn how they can increase the quality of their datasets by applying them.

News

Last month, I had the pleasure to give the opening keynote at the 18th edition of the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC24) in Edinburgh. One of the many concerns of this age is the ability to trust information around us. Transparency is one way to promote trust, and in this sense the conference theme ‘Trust through Transparency’ struck me as both timely and relevant.

It is DANS’ mission to support you in making your data FAIR. We have therefore collected a number of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and published them on our website.

On 6 March 2024, MLCommons (an Artificial Intelligence engineering consortium) announced the release of Croissant, a metadata format to help standardise machine learning (ML) datasets. The aim of Croissant is to make datasets easily discoverable and usable across tools and platforms. This is highly relevant in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) tasks on FAIR data sustainability and important for Linked Data in general.