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Research Data Services

Are you worried about your valuable research data being preserved?

A new service, Fairdata PAS, is now available for the long-term digital preservation of research data. Fairdata PAS ensures the reliable preservation of your research data for decades, even for centuries. For this purpose, we are looking for data sets to be used in piloting the service at Tampere University.

There are no strict criteria for pilot data sets, but the following aspects could be considered:

  1. The producer of the data considers the data to be significant, for example, because it is in some way unique, it has taken time and effort to produce the data, or the data has potential to be utilized in future research.
  2. There is no alternative long-term preservation service, for example, the Finnish Social Science Data Archive or the Language Bank of Finland, available for the data. In other words, we are not looking for textual survey or interview data, or recorded speech.
  3. The data set is connected to the Tampere University.

There are currently no specific technical requirements for pilot data set, but the single most important thing for us is to find suitable data sets to test the Fairdata PAS service and the related processes in our university. The pilot data sets are not published or opened within the project; the focus is strictly on digital preservation.

To participate in piloting, nothing more than collaboration with the project team is expected. The project team takes care of practicalities as far as possible. In exchange for participation, you have an opportunity to get your data well preserved also for future generations of researchers and visibility for your research.

Suggestions for pilot data sets can be sent until November 6, 2020 to the Tampere University Research Data Services at researchdata@tuni.fi.

Further information: Project Manager Turkka Näppilä (turkka.nappila@tuni.fi, 050 509 9030).

Information stored on paper will remain usable for centuries under favorable conditions, but maintaining digital data usable requires active measures, as devices, software and file formats change and become outdated relatively quickly. The Ministry of Education and Culture provides Finnish universities and research institutes with a service called Fairdata PAS (PAS = long-term preservation) for the long-term preservation of research data (https://www.fairdata.fi/fairdata-pas/ ). The service is provided by CSC.

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