Events
In 2018 AUSSDA was part of many exciting events. We were happy to welcome the members of our National Board and our International Board in Vienna. We presented AUSSDA and our services at the University of Salzburg, the Open Access Days in Graz and the Day of Political Science in Innsbruck. AUSSDA employees shared their knowledge about the Data Protection Basic Regulation (DSGVO), data collection and data management in numerous discussion rounds, lectures and workshops.
Daily Business
In addition to the activities mentioned above, the focus in 2018 was on the further development of our core processes. The approach to data producers throughout Austria led to the fact that more and more data was made available via our new digital archive, the AUSSDA Dataverse. Some data can be downloaded freely, others require a login and others are only available on request - depending on data protection aspects. We are also continuing to work on automated metadata migration to transfer our legacy archive and retire it. A template for a data management plan is available for new research projects. In addition, we also conducted fundamental research on the structure of Austria's social sciences.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank the researchers who have entrusted us with their data. From signing the contract to data preparation and publication, it was a pleasure for us to work with your data! At AUSSDA, we naturally want to help these data to reach the public that they deserve. Therefore, there is a section on news articles on our website, you can find us on Twitter (@theAUSSDA) or, if you want to find out more, register for our newsletter. We have also made a video in which you can get to know AUSSDA.
Archiving with a European component
There was also close cooperation with our European partners in the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) in 2018. At a train-the-trainer event in Ljubljana we were just as active as at the intensive work on the project "DataverseEU". After long preparatory work, AUSSDA also participated in an EU project that will start in 2019. Within the framework of the Austrian EU Council Presidency, numerous events on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) took place in Vienna, at some of which AUSSDA was very prominently represented.
Legal issue
One topic that occupied us throughout 2018 is the GDPR. Various archiving and usage agreements are in place to ensure that the interests of all those involved in research and data re-use can be taken into account. We take the protection of your data very seriously, regardless of whether you are a data provider or a data user.
On our own behalf
As announced last year, our team has continued to grow this year. With Julian Ausserhofer, Iris Butzlaff, Lisa Hönegger, Stefan Kasberger and Annika Schwabe (all at our location in Vienna) we have not only gained a deputy manager, but also brought a lot of joy, knowledge and commitment into our team. We would also like to take this opportunity to thank those former colleagues who took new paths in 2018.
As this brief summary of the last few months shows, we were quite busy in 2018. Therefore, we will take a short break: Our offices will be closed from 22 December to 1 January.
We wish you a merry Christmas, relaxing holidays and only the best for 2019!
