15. EUDAT: Supporting the complete Research Data Management Lifecycle

Among librarians and data managers, there is a growing awareness that the “rising tide of data” requires new approaches to data management and that data preservation, access and sharing should be supported in a seamless way. Data, and a fortiori Big Data, is a cross-cutting issue touching all research communities and infrastructures.

EUDAT’s vision is to enable European researchers and practitioners from any research discipline to preserve, find, access, and process data in a trusted environment. This environment is part of a Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI): a network of collaborating centres, combining the richness of community-specific data repositories with the steadiness of some of Europe’s largest scientific data centres. Our mission is to enable data stewardship within and between European research communities through this CDI.

Data managers and librarians across Europe but also globally are particularly important for the success of EUDAT. Librarians and data managers working at research libraries, national libraries, library organisations and information centres know what the researchers in their institutions need, and they are often the first point of contact for researchers with questions about safe storing and sharing of their research data. Data managers and librarians are a key channel to promote EUDAT products and services to the researchers generating data and the research infrastructures that store it. As such, they play a key role in improving the full lifecycle of research data management in their own institution and in Europe as a whole.

EUDAT has developed a suite of research data management services to support researchers in their daily work and with their ever increasing data management challenges. EUDAT services allow accessing of data, depositing of data, informal data sharing, long-term archiving, data identification, and discoverability and computability of both long-tail data and big data.

EUDAT has developed the following services:

B2DROP is a secure and trusted data exchange service for researchers and scientists to keep their research data synchronized and up-to-date and to exchange with other researchers. B2SHARE is a user-friendly, reliable and trustworthy way for researchers, scientific communities and scientists to store and share small-scale research data from diverse contexts. B2STAGE is a reliable, efficient, and easy-to-use service to transfer research data sets between EUDAT storage resources and high-performance computing workspaces. B2FIND is EUDAT’s simple, user friendly metadata catalogue allowing users to discover metadata from a wide range of scientific communities. B2SAFE is a safe and highly available service which allows community and departmental repositories to implement data management policies on their research data across multiple administrative domains in a trustworthy manner. B2ACCESS is an easy-to-use and secure Authentication and Authorization platform.

Through a series of data pilots, including some that focus on libraries and cultural heritage (e.g. Europeana, Aalto University) EUDAT collaborates with research infrastructures and communities offering solutions to their research data challenges and requirements.

For more information on EUDAT visit https://www.eudat.eu/