Finnish Social Science Data Archive: Strategic Plan 2021–2024

Reliable and adaptable expert organisation on research data

Vision

FSD is a trusted expert organisation on long-term preservation and access to research data. We promote the impact of research data, quality of research and development of data archiving activities in Finland and in the international arena.

Mission

FSD preserves data collected to study Finnish society, people and cultural phenomena in the long term. We disseminate data to reusers reliably and efficiently through our modern services.

FSD cooperates with national and international research infrastructures, cultural heritage organisations and the research community to meet the goals of the strategy period 2021–2024. We continue to enhance the interoperability of our core services both on the national and international level. Our long-term vision is that in 2030 research data and their metadata will flow seamlessly between the infrastructures, and the infrastructures will collaborate to provide researchers comprehensive and functional services while recognising each other's strengths and expertise.

We build and maintain trust in research and science by aligning all our activities with our values: responsibility, openness, equality, collaboration and community.

We align our work with these values by following the FAIR principles and making our services and data easily findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Our data and services are as open as possible and as closed as necessary.

We also realise our values by supporting research that promotes UN Sustainable Development Goals and by improving our monitoring of these goals.

Main goals of the strategy period

1. Support our users in opening and reusing high quality research data in a responsible manner

FSD cares for its users and preserves archived data in the long term. We provide guidance to data producers in responsibly opening their data and support data reusers in discovering and using archived data. We offer both technical solutions and up-to-date support material as well as in-person user support.

FSD develops and improves its services, maintains and updates expertise and makes use of its collaborative networks to respond to new requirements of opening data.

2. Promote the wide and versatile impact, visibility and international use of Finnish research data

FSD is an expert organisation in long-term preservation of digital data in the social sciences and humanities, whose strengths include expertise in data protection, anonymisation, metadata and information systems. We aim for wider and more comprehensive use of our metadata in various national and international services. This allows different kinds of users to discover data of interest and gain access to them as easily and openly as possible.

FSD collaborates with the national and international open science community to build interoperability and promote harmonisation of data, metadata and services. Interoperable, smooth, adaptable and modern infrastructure services eliminate redundancies and promote efficient use of resources.

3. Improve the interoperability of data and information systems

FSD's services in Finnish and English increase the wider impact and visibility of research and data. FSD's services constitute a part of an international web of services for science and research through their availability in the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The availability of services in English and participation in multilingual service provision increases the visibility and competitiveness of Finnish data in the social sciences and humanities. Knowledge, insights and refined data based on the archived datasets widen the impact of research data beyond the scientific community.

4. Promote comparative research

One of the starting points of data archiving activities in the social sciences is the preservation of quantitative data over decades to be used in comparative research. FSD manages this function by participating in large-scale, cross-national survey research programmes and providing users access to harmonised national data series allowing longitudinal analyses.

FSD collaborates with researchers and data producers in promoting shared and open data collection and analysis methodology in comparative research.