DASSI Statute

STATUTE Version 1.0 2024-07-17 STATUTE DASSI - Data Archive for Social Sciences in Italy (2024-07-17). Statute (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17277319 DASSI - Data Archive for Social Sciences in Italy Milan/Rome - Italy [email protected] www.dassi-archive.it This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International STATUTE Data Archive for Social Sciences in Italy (DASSI) is the Italian national Service Provider of the European research infrastructure CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). DASSI is established and governed by the University of Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB) and the National Research Council (CNR), and has been officially recognized as such by the Ministry of University and Research (MUR) since 2021. Purpose The main objective of DASSI, in accordance with CESSDA, involves supporting the scientific community, making it possible to conduct high-quality research in the field of social sciences. Specifically, DASSI operates in order to guarantee the long-term preservation and sharing of research data, ensuring the compliance with the FAIR principles¹. DASSI’s activities aim at creating value from research data, improving its visibility and accessibility, and precisely documenting the whole data curation process, to enable the scientific community to use these resources correctly and autonomously. DASSI then promotes the secondary analysis and reuse of empirical data; it improves the knowledge and awareness of sharing high-quality data for scientific research; it makes it possible for researchers to acquire the necessary know-how for the collection and dissemination of such data. DASSI upholds and promotes the values of Open Science, striving to ensure that research data is “as open as possible”, and continuously and widely accessible. Activities and services DASSI fits into the Italian landscape of research infrastructures for the social sciences, providing several useful services to carry out research excellence in this scientific domain. Specifically, DASSI is responsible for the acquisition, preservation and sharing of research data for social sciences at national level. In particular, the activities regard: Data acquisition It promotes at the national level the deposit of data by researchers who operate in the field of social sciences. It develops tools and procedures for the deposit of data, ¹FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. For more details see Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al.The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 3, 160018 (2016). DOI:10.1038/sdata.2016.18 1 STATUTE paying particular attention to the protection of intellectual property, copyright, ethical principles and the user licence; Management and data curation for long-term preservation DASSI operates in compliance with the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model in order to guarantee the correct preservation and dissemination of data. This activity includes controls over the quality of the data and documentation, analysis of the disclosure risk, cleaning and standardisation procedures and all the transformations needed to guarantee the data’s long-term preservation and distribution; Data discovery DASSI provides an online catalogue that simplifies the process of discovering and identifying resources available for access. Each data is described and documented in detail using the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) standard, which is the main metadata system used internationally in the social sciences field. The online catalogue guarantees the interoperability of data and enables harvesting by other metadata systems, such as the CESSDA Data Catalogue. Finally, each data is associated with a persistent identifier which guarantees its unique identification and facilitates its citation; Data access and distribution DASSI is responsible for handling user requests for data and its distribution. Data is accessible through the online catalogue which is implemented through the Dataverse platform. DASSI promotes open access to these resources through use of Creative Commons licences. Users and Designated Communities DASSI’s primary Designated Community consists of (academic and non-academic) researchers who operate in social sciences and can act as both data providers (i.e.those who create the data) and end users (i.e.those who use the data created by others). The secondary Designated Community includes students, teachers, educators, policymakers, public administration managers and operators, business people, media representatives, journalists, citizens or anyone who wants to use the data available at the DASSI’s catalogue (end users only). It is expected that end users will have a minimum level of literacy with research data, i.e.they can look for the data which is best suited to a specific scientific or socio-economic problem and can assess the usability of these 2 STATUTE resources. They should have an elementary knowledge of the methods and techniques relating to the collection and construction of the data they access. DASSI provides detailed contextual documentation to guarantee that the content of the data can be understood by anyone in the designated community. Organisational structure DASSI is set up as a national data archive which operates in the social sciences field. The research infrastructure has been created through a Joint Research Unit (JRU) between the University of Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB) and the National Research Council (CNR), which establishes the forms of collaboration between the two partners. The JRU envisages the establishment of two internal bodies: the Management and Coordination Committee (Italian acronym CGC) and the Scientific Technical Committee (Italian acronym CTS). The former is the DASSI governance board, which coordinates and manages all the activities, and consists of members belonging to the partner institutions. The latter is the body responsible for the technical and scientific support functions, as well as making proposals and providing consultancy on the issues relating to the planning and scheduling of DASSI’s scientific and technological activities. It consists of national and international experts from the social sciences sector and from the sector for digital research infrastructure. From the operational viewpoint, DASSI has a distributed organisational structure consisting of two integrated units: Data curation: which handles all the activities regarding the acquisition and management of data for research; e-Research Infrastructure: which coordinates the activities connected to the preservation, access to and dissemination of data for research and to the management of the services realised and developed by e-RI. 3 STATUTE Each partner coordinates a specific unit: the Data Curation unit is coordinated by UNIMIB, while the e-Research Infrastructure unit is coordinated by the CNR. The staff involved in the activities envisaged by DASSI can belong to both the partner institutions with a view to full collaboration between them. The original of this document was drawn up in the Italian language. The Italian version is the authentic version and shall prevail over the English version in all matters of interpretation and construction. 4