Archives des savoirs : De la gestion des données de recherche vers une gestion des données pour la recherche

This contribution was presented at the Swiss University and College Archivists' Day, held at the University of Lausanne on October 16, 2014.

The management of research data is vital for research on any kind: Data needs to be managed during the research process to facilitate current research and needs to stay exploitable afterwards to facilitate future research.

The European program Horizon 2020 requires data management plans to be written for any research project financed by it. This will have a strong impact also on Swiss research, which receives a significant amount of European research grants.

Information professionals specialized in document and data management need to impose themselves as essential partners. They need to make sure that Swiss universities and other institutes of higher education strongly commit to this way of working, because this is where the trend of research information management and open research data is going.

For the University of Lausanne, no general policy has been put into place yet. Some guidelines mention the issue, but only indirectly.

On the campus of Lausanne, certain university partners like the Swiss Foundation of Research in Social Sciences (FORS) and its data services already offer technical and organizational solutions to manage research data. The local implementation of this foundation as well as its openness to federal and international institutions could make it a strategically interesting partner. A partnership with an institution like the EPFL and its Laboratory of Digital Humanities could equally be useful in the creation of a common policy.

Therefore, practical means are required. Furthermore, the policy creation is a shared responsibility and the fruit of collaboration between academic institutions, information and IT specialists, lawyers, etc.