Customisable EUDAT services as part of CSC’s service portfolio
CSC’s data services enable our customers to adopt good data management practices. Good data management encourages the reuse of data, so that additional benefit can be taken from the data already produced. Research benefits from improved access to and understandability of data, and data producers have practices for storing, describing and publishing data. For research organisations, the services will provide better visibility of their own data production, in the same way that publication production has long been monitored.
CSC offers a comprehensive range of data management services to help customers take care of their valuable data. Today, CSC offers EUDAT data services as part of its own service portfolio. EUDAT is a European consortium with its roots in EU projects led by CSC.
The main difference between EUDAT services and CSC’s other data services is their customisability: EUDAT services can be tailored to the customer’s needs. Some EUDAT services are also available in free versions that are open to all. These common services provide an easy way for individual users or small teams to store, share and publish files and datasets.
CSC’s customised EUDAT services are catering to needs that are not covered by the common services. CSC can tailor a data management solution based on EUDAT services to meet the specific needs of customer organisation. The EUDAT services available from CSC are B2SHARE, B2DROP and B2SAFE. Noteworthy is also that metadata published in the EUDAT services can be copied to other services boosting the discoverability and impact of the data.
The EUDAT service is always customised to the specific needs of the organisation requesting the customisation. A customised EUDAT service can enable
- an organisation-specific view of the data produced
- customisation of user management and access rights. Rights can be opened and restricted both for your own organisation and for partners
- publish data according to your own policies in your own service
- integration of EUDAT services into your own services through application interfaces
- providing an internal data service to own end-users.
Data is stored securely in the CSC data center and, if agreed, a second copy can be stored in another EUDAT center. Typical customisation projects have included opening and publishing research data, sharing data across organisational boundaries, restricting access or storing data that is important for the organisation to manage but that it cannot or does not want to open. The services are also suitable for managing data that is in an active phase of collecting or analysis.
Tailoring to customer needs complements CSC’s range of data management services by providing customised solutions. Customisation is always carried out on the basis of the customer’s order and is charged to the customer. The customisation of the service is formulated as an implementation project according to the customer needs and in addition an annual fee is applied.
EUDAT services are widely used in Europe, facilitating international cooperation, for example by bringing together data produced in different parts of the world on a same platform. The interoperability of EUDAT services with the CSC service portfolio is continuously being developed. EUDAT services are also part of European cooperation, in particular the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EUDAT’s strong position in EOSC ensures interoperability with respect to data management in Europe.
More information:
For more information on EUDAT services, please contact servicedesk@csc.fi.
Antti Pursula
The author is a development manager at CSC and head of secretariat of EUDAT consortium
Tommi Kutilainen
The author has a few decades of experience in scicomm at CSC and he is especially interrested in everything. Twitter: @TommiKutilainen