The year 2017 marked the start of a new four-year strategy for the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD).

"FSD Strategy for Years 2017–2020: An International Expert of Responsible Open Science" is all about FSD’s aims to extensively develop its services to be interoperable with the services of national and international partners. FSD emphasises its role as a service-oriented expert organisation that is responsibly FAIR – all services and data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

The year 2017 was a busy one for FSD. A dominating theme in operations development and numerous training sessions was preparing for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union and concurrent changes to the national legislation. For instance, FSD produced its first “data balance sheet” to map out its current level of data protection and development needs in data archive work. FSD also revised its agreement texts to be in line with GDPR’s requirements. Terminology work as well as practices involving data anonymisation, processing and long-term preservation were also developed in 2017. Quantitative data files are now produced in the CSV format in addition to the SPSS portable format. Moreover, data descriptions of previously archived datasets were updated.

FSD redesigned its “Data by Theme” page, which introduces data series and datasets on certain themes. New themes were also included. To top the year off, a theme page entitled “Life in the 100-year-old Finland”, which introduces research data collected in Finland in 2017, was published in December.

The search function of the Aila Data Service was updated. (...)

FSD’s year 2017 in figures:

• 85 new datasets
• 1,050 contacts made regarding data acquisition
• 12.51GB of archived data
• 1,338 datasets available on Aila
• 647 depositors from 130 different organisations
• 2,905 datasets downloaded for reuse
• 932 registered downloaders of data
• Altogether 3,134 registered Aila users
• ...

More information:

• The Annual Report can be downloaded (in Finnish).
• Full-length news item on the FSD website.