Daily business
The year 2020 started for the AUSSDA team with software upgrades to our repository Dataverse, making our data portal even better and faster. Shortly after, the team faced a big challenge: switching to working from home. Thanks to the good cooperation of all colleagues, all our services were continuously available and our service portfolio could even be expanded.
To provide the scientific community with the most up-to-date data on the pandemic as quickly as possible, AUSSDA launched the "COVID-19 Data Fast Track Publishing" project with the support of the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). AUSSDA has thus created a central collection point for COVID-19 social science studies from Austria, which are available to researchers worldwide.
In 2020, we also successfully retired NESSTAR, AUSSDA's first data archive. 565 datasets have now found their new home in our AUSSDA Dataverse. There you can also archive your data in a Core Trust Seal-certified repository: With the CTS certification in July 2020, AUSSDA is officially and internationally recognised as a reliable and sustainable data archive and the first so-called "trustworthy repository" for social science data in Austria.
In October, we were pleased to be part of the first virtual “Lange Nacht der Forschung”. Our contribution was a video about Open Science and how society benefits from it. We then celebrated the end of the year with the launch of a new service: Starting 2021, researchers associated with one of our partner universities will be able to independently archive and publish data in the AUSSDA Dataverse using the Self-Deposit Service.
European projects
As part of the Horizon 2020 projects EOSC-Pillar and SSHOC, we actively participated in the design of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Last year, the AUSSDA project team around EOSC-Pillar presented the results of a broad survey among research and funding organisations in Austria, Belgium, Germany, France and Italy and developed concepts to get research institutions on board the EOSC.
With the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC), the first project results were shared with the research community at a large virtual stakeholder forum in November 2020. AUSSDA also contributed to the success of the project this year in the areas of communication and dissemination, as well as with developments in pyDataverse.
On our behalf
In 2020, we were again pleased to welcome new colleagues: with Manfred Herzog (Graz), Manuela Wiesinger (Linz) and Daniel Melichar (Vienna), we have brought social science knowledge, library accuracy and technical know-how into the team. A big thank you also to those former staff members who broke new ground in 2020. We would also like to take this opportunity to remember our dear colleague Patrick Zieserl, who passed away unexpectedly in April.
The challenging year 2020 ends with a short break: Our offices will remain closed from 24th December 2020 to 3rd January 2021.
We wish you relaxing holidays and only the best for 2021!
