Self-Assessment DANS for Periodic Evaluation of the Institute
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Self-assessment DANS for periodic evaluation of the institute Version 1.7 06-10-2017 Content Preface: DANS and the Standard Evaluation Protocol ................................................. 2 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 3 1. Organisation .................................................................................................... 4 1.1. Mission .................................................................................................. 4 1.2. Governance ............................................................................................ 4 1.3. Composition and staff .............................................................................. 5 1.4. Finances ................................................................................................ 5 1.5. Organisation development ........................................................................ 5 2. Strategy .......................................................................................................... 7 3. Results achieved in the past six years (2011-2016) ............................................... 8 3.1 Quality of DANS research data services ...................................................... 8 3.2 Scientific quality of research at DANS ....................................................... 10 3.3 PhD students ........................................................................................ 10 3.4 Relevance to society .............................................................................. 11 4 Relevant environmental developments, forecast of trends, and viability ............... 12 4.1 Relevant environmental developments over the past six years ..................... 12 4.2 Forecast of trends in the coming years ..................................................... 13 4.3 Viability ............................................................................................... 14 5 SWOT analysis and benchmarking of DANS ..................................................... 16 5.1 SWOT Analysis ...................................................................................... 16 5.2 Benchmarking ....................................................................................... 17 6 Integrity and standards ................................................................................ 19 6.1 Institutional and data integrity ................................................................ 19 6.2 International certification standards ......................................................... 20 7 Diversity ..................................................................................................... 21 Appendix 1: D1 – Output indicators ...................................................................... 22 Appendix 2: Datametric analysis of DANS Data Archive ........................................... 24 Appendix 3: D3a – Research staff ......................................................................... 32 Appendix 4: D3b – Research output ...................................................................... 32 Appendix 5: D3c – Total funding of the institute ..................................................... 32 Appendix 6: D3d – PhD candidates ....................................................................... 33 Appendix 7: List of abbreviations and definitions ..................................................... 34 Appendix 8: A selection of national and international projects carried out by DANS in the past few years, and some recent data/research infrastructure proposals .................... 38 Appendix 9: Other relevant documents .................................................................. 39 1 Preface: DANS and the Standard Evaluation Protocol The following quote from the previous evaluation of DANS still applies: “DANS’ position in the KNAW is unique, for two reasons. First, it is the only institute that is funded by the KNAW and NWO. Second, it is the only institute where the emphasis is on service, not research.”1 The Standard Evaluation Protocol (SEP) 2015-2021, which describes the methods used to assess research conducted at Dutch universities, NWO and Academy institutes every six years, as well as the aims of such assessments, does not apply very well to DANS. The SEP assessment criteria are grouped in three broad categories: 1. Research quality 2. Relevance to society 3. Viability Doing research is a secondary activity at DANS. Our modest research is mostly applied and explicitly aims to support the development of our core services. We welcome an evaluation of the quality of our small research group, but assessing DANS on those criteria does not do justice to the main task of the institute, which is to encourage permanent access to digital research resources. To rank such services under “relevance to society” is also inadequate. We serve primarily a scientific audience: the majority of our users are scholars and scientists, and it makes sense to distinguish them from the wider public.2 We have nonetheless attempted to apply the SEP criteria as much as feasible, but we suggest to interpret “research quality” as “quality of scientific services” when evaluating DANS. 1See: Accumulating Archives: DANS - 2005-2010, KNAW Evaluation Report, November, 2010 - http://knaw.nl/shared/resources/actueel/bestanden/DANS_Evaluation_Report_2010.pdf. 2 The documentation on the previous evaluation of DANS in 2010-2011 is available here: https://www.knaw.nl/en/institutes/dans. 2 Introduction Over the past ten years, about 2.5 million data files from 225 thousand datasets have been downloaded from the DANS data archives. The content of the archives grew from around 15,000 files (in 1,500 datasets) in 2007 to over 4 million files (in 35,000 datasets) today (August 2017). During this decade, half a million users visited the data archives, paying together over a million visits.3 The annual number of visits grew from 20,000 in 2007 to 160,000 in 2016. The annual number of users has been fluctuating around 60,000 a year since 2010. The total volume of data in the DANS EASY archive grew from 0,1 TB in 2007 to about 15 TB today.4 Research data are now generally regarded as a valuable research output, much more so than at the time of the previous evaluation. The past few years have been quite turbulent where research data are concerned. Many new players in this area have appeared, although several newcomers have already given up and disappeared. An international registry counted just a few hundred research data repositories in 2012, about 1,500 in early 2016, and close to 2,000 now5. DANS is regularly adapting both its organisation and its services to the rapidly changing demands and rising expectations. In the Netherlands, virtually all self-respecting research organisations (funders, universities, institutes) have formulated data policies over the past five years. We see two interrelated explanations for the increased interest in research data, also at the political level: • Big Data is offering great new opportunities for research. • Open Science (including Open Data) has become a new paradigm: transparency of the full research cycle is both increasing scientific productivity and preventing malconduct. Currently, institutional data policies are at different stages of implementation. DANS started providing back-office services to institutional repositories already a couple of years ago, offering expert advice and training, technical and organisational repository solutions, aggregating and disseminating the increasingly distributed data and research resources, and long-term archiving options to institutions, national and international. DANS is aware that it is a relatively small player from a country of modest size, and therefore puts a lot of energy in forging both national and international coalitions and collaborations. With our background in the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences, we have succeeded in becoming a respectable player internationally, even among Big Science facilities. We consider our international role vital for our future direction and indispensable for our national role. DANS has recently started a complete overhaul of its service infrastructure, adjusting them to expected future requirements, focusing on our unique selling point of a combination of deep expertise and practical experience in providing data services, making sure the services are adaptive to the changing needs of both individual researchers and institutions. Research and Development projects underpin our innovative spirit. Like DANS was the cradle of the international Data Seal of Approval, internationally the most successful standard for trustworthy digital repositories, our ambition is to be the first to propose a practical implementation of the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and a hands-on mechanism to establish the conditions for data sharing under the new European privacy regulation 3 Users and visits are counted on a “daily unique” basis: two visits by the same user on the same day count as one, but on two different days they count as two. 4 Calculated here is: single storage of data for distribution; in reality, data is stored multiple times in at least two different geographic locations, and of certain file types archival versions (not for distribution), such as high- resolution images and videos, are stored separately. 5 http://www.re3data.org/ 3 (GDPR),