5 years of AUSSDA

A great reason to celebrate: AUSSDA is five years old!  We have taken this anniversary as an opportunity to invite our partners, supporters and interested members from the social science community in Austria to the Sky Lounge of the University of Vienna on 5 June, 2023 - to toast achievements and discuss new developments for AUSSDA. Our anniversary’s motto was  "The role of research infrastructures and the future of shared services".

Since AUSSDA was launched at the end of 2017, our Dataverse has grown to over 1500 datasets. We have developed new services, such as training and consulting on Data Management Plans (DMPs) and Research Data Management (RDM), and have been key partners in major European infrastructure projects (such as SSHOC and EOSC-Pillar). At our event, we looked back on goals and successes achieved so far. However, the focus lay on the future of AUSSDA as an RDM partner for the Austrian social science community and as a member of European research infrastructures.

Achievements, feedback from the community and new ideas

In her welcoming words, Maria Seissl, Director of the University Library of Vienna, described AUSSDA as a success story: "AUSSDA shows that libraries can establish and implement research data management as a core business." Lars Kaczmirek, Head of AUSSDA, outlined the development of AUSSDA over the past five years ­– from its project status to its the establishment at four universities, the certification with the Core Trust Seal and the steadily growing number of users and downloads in our Dataverse.

For the future development of AUSSDA, the social science community’s needs and requirements play a key role. This is why we made sure to hear their thoughts and ideas at our event as well. In a live survey, Lisa Hönegger and Dimitri Prandner asked for feedback on the question of which services AUSSDA should develop in the future. Among other things, our guests mentioned consulting and training on qualitative data (a service AUSSDA has recently set up), expanded search functions in the Dataverse, low-threshold communication with students and the establishment of a safe centre for highly sensitive data. These are all important suggestions that we will consider when we plan for new AUSSDA services.

The first AUSSDA Data Award

A highlight of our event was the presentation of the AUSSDA Data Award, which we handed out for the first time. The winner of the category "Best Student Paper" is Christina Gahn, a pre-doctoral research fellow at the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. For her Master's thesis in Political Science, she studied the campaigns of Austrian parties for the 2017 parliamentary elections on Facebook, obtaining the data from our Dataverse. Her thesis convinced our jury on a theoretical, methodological and stylistic level.

Panel Discussion

To conclude our anniversary event, a high-level panel of representatives from the community, the Austrian Ministry of Education and CESSDA discussed AUSSDA’s position in the national research landscape, as well as Open Science and future challenges for national and European research infrastructures. You can watch the recording of the discussion here (in German).

We would like to sincerely thank all our guests - for their participation, their well wishes and the numerous suggestions they provided us with for the future!