News

Making qualitative data – like interview or case study data – available for reuse is often challenging as it is rich and complex data that is difficult to anonymize without losing crucial information. To help researchers and data stewards working with these types of data, DANS has created a guidebook, which is now available on Zenodo.

From the 20th to the 24th of March members of DANS attended the 20th plenary meeting of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) in Gothenburg, Sweden. Attendance at the plenary gave DANS the opportunity to engage with the outputs of the range of active RDA working groups and interest groups, to network with international data experts and to advance key projects led or supported by our organisation. 

Humanities researchers tend to work with data derived from heritage collections, such as museums, archives or heritage libraries. Ideally, these data remain available for anybody to use for their own research interests. Often, however, when the projects which generate the data have ended, there are no means to turn the datasets into truly interoperable and reusable resources. It is therefore fortunate that the CLARIAH digital infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities has now designated funding specifically for that: curating existing heritage data sets with the aim of making them useful for a wide range of scholars.

While curating datasets, we regularly come across gems that deserve to be highlighted. Such is the case with this dataset from the recovery of a Short Stirling W7630 fighter plane in the municipality of Echt-Susteren, Limburg, The Netherlands. This Short Stirling is the first aircraft salvaged according to the ‘National Programme for Salvage of Aircraft Wrecks’ and the research is yielding surprising insights.

Tilburg University (TiU) uses DataverseNL as the institutional repository for their research data. Recently, the repository was recertified with the CoreTrustSeal certificate; this certification verifies the reliability and sustainability of digital repositories. This recertification underlines TiU’s ongoing commitment to meeting the highest standards for research data management and preservation.

Want to learn what research councils know and learn about Open Science? Check out their seminar platform, which now is openly available online.

To better assist the community in applying open, FAIR, and Research Data Management (RDM) practices, we aim to develop guidance specifically on qualitative data and the possibilities for making it more FAIR and available for reuse. But what are the community’s needs? A survey during the February edition of the Data Stewards Interest Group (DISG)-meeting gave insights into those needs. The short report on this survey is now available online.

Contrary to earlier announcements, the NARCIS website will remain online until Monday 3 July. This was decided because it was recently announced that a number of parties need more time to make adjustments.

The technical environment as well as the content of the NARCIS website have been frozen from 9 January 2023. The NARCIS service will not be updated anymore. In case of issues, the site will have to be taken offline. For this reason, and because harvesting on behalf of NARCIS will also end then, 3 July is the deadline for phasing out.