Assessment of Service Provider Capacities. CESSDA Work Plan 2020.

Journals Outreach is a sub-task of the CESSDA Work Plan 2020 Task Widening Activities and Journals Outreach. The objective of this report is to provide an assessment of CESSDA Service Providers’ (SPs) capacities, policies, and services for responding to the needs of journals with respect to access and medium/long term preservation of data and replication material. To this effect, an online survey targeting the current consortium of 22 CESSDA Members was conducted, with questions guided by the findings of the first deliverable. The survey sought to profile SPs in relation to the requirements expected by journals, to assess potential limitations encountered, to gather information on actual and planned collaboration with journals, to investigate potential support that SPs would benefit from and to gauge their views on CESSDA’s involvement in coordinating such initiatives. The first major finding is that SPs are well placed to offer long-term curated data collections, quality control, personalised expert curation support and links to publications, training on data management planning and promotional material related to data usage. The second major finding is that the SPs are overwhelmingly positive towards offering data sharing and replication services in collaboration with publishers and journals.