Text: Marianne Fuglsang Welling Farsinsen, ITS Photo/video: CLAAUDIA/Hjortlund Medier

 

The work on the project stems from Knowledge for the World and has been ongoing since the beginning of 2022. Before the year ends, CLAAUDIA expects the solution to be put into operation at AAU. The aim of the archive is to offer AAU's researchers a secure storage of research data, where it is simultaneously possible to find or retrieve information about this data - also for external users. This provides the opportunity for research to have much greater reach and impact, because it can be fed into further research, and new collaborations can develop from it. Carina Ollerup Christensen, data management consultant at CLAAUDIA, explains:

- Part of the universities' national data management strategy is to work according to the FAIR principles. FAIR is short for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, and it is especially Findable that the data archive here honours. Research data can often not be made openly available to the outside world, e.g. due to GDPR, but it is possible to create transparency about the existence of this data. When we do this in a secure way, we offer researchers a tool that enables their research to make a valuable contribution in other research contexts and create new collaborations, says Carina Ollerup Christensen.

Project with extensive pilot involvement

Over the course of the year, all faculties have been involved in the work, and it is thus both the authorities' requirements and AAU researchers' input that form the basis for the design of the data archive. Project manager at CLAAUDIA Nina Sander Aagaard explains:

- It has been incredibly important to find out how the researchers each work with data at the departments. Some have a high level of familiarity and an established way of working with data, and for others it's completely new to think of data storage as something that can have greater reach when we put the right tools, such as the archive, into play. This confirms our need to guide researchers based on their circumstances and to provide them with relevant tools. We are looking forward to not only talking about a strategy, but actually being able to offer our researchers good tools to be able to realise the intentions of the strategy – the data archive, AAU DataDeposit, as it is called, is a concrete example of this, says Nina Sander Aagaard.

Currently, the final input from pilot tests is being incorporated into the solution, and when AAU DataDeposit is ready for operation, the launch will be announced at AAU.

 

For questions or more information about the data archive at this time, please contact CLAAUDIA at claaudia@its.aau.dk.