SWISSUbase: Data and Project Finder in Switzerland

SWISSUbase is a national platform for the publication of research data and provides an online public catalogue for discovering datasets and projects from Swiss higher education institutions. It offers discipline-specific metadata schemas for the Social Sciences and Linguistics, with a schema for the Humanities currently under development, in addition to a discipline-agnostic metadata schema. Reflecting the current needs of its consortium partners, SWISSUbase functions both as a thematic repository in a national context and as a generic repository in an institutional context. 

To accommodate a variety of access and licensing needs, datasets in SWISSUbase may be published under Creative Commons licences or restricted via closed access, depending on ethical, legal, or contractual considerations. Datasets are globally accessible for download, subject to applicable access conditions.

The platform also provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for datasets and version control, ensuring long-term accessibility and citation. To enable data interoperability and integration with external systems, SWISSUbase offers both a RESTful API and OAI-PMH endpoints. From a technological perspective, the platform is developed and maintained by FORS, the Swiss Centre of Expertise in the Social Sciences, in close collaboration with a network of institutional and disciplinary partners.

Currently, the majority of datasets in SWISSUbase are published under closed access; some additionally require the author’s prior agreement before access is granted due to the sensitive nature of the data being published. This raises several issues to be addressed within the EOSC Data Commons project, including the need to ensure the findability of complete metadata records for such datasets, the clear flagging of access restrictions, the provision of information on how and where access can be obtained, and the potential consideration of developing or integrating appropriate workflows to manage and facilitate access requests.
Additionally, information about the original tools or services used by the data depositor may be missing or not easily discoverable in the accompanying metadata or documentation. There is a need to support the reuse of datasets that require specific tools or services for meaningful analysis, particularly in the social sciences and linguistics, where specialised software is often used for qualitative data analysis. Within the EOSC Data Commons project, this requires addressing issues related to providing clear information and links to the tools or services used initially by the data depositor. It also involves identifying and recommending other suitable tools that could support reuse across different contexts, as well as offering guidance on how users can access these services.

• Improve the discoverability of metadata and the transparency of access conditions for datasets with restricted access
• Facilitate the reuse of datasets by providing clear information on appropriate tools and services for working with the data

• Integration with EOSC Matchmaker
• Metadata enrichment, including detailed and precise descriptions of datasets with closed access
• Datasets with restricted access are discoverable via the Metadata Warehouse, where access conditions and workflows for obtaining access are made transparent
• Datasets are matched with appropriate tools to support replication or further analysis
• Support EOSC Data Player by providing metadata on the tools used initially in data generation and analysis, thereby enabling the reproduction or re-execution of analytical workflows, supporting research reproducibility, and facilitating new analyses.