Highlights from 2016 from CESSDA's partner in Sweden SND are presented in its annual report 2016 published last week.

Max Petzold, Director, sets the scene in the foreword by focusing on two events of particular importance for SND during 2016:

• SND became the first Swedish repository to receive Data Seal of Approval certification, proof of devoted staff and users, and an important milestone in SND’s development.
• The Research Policy Bill in November tasked the Research Council with coordinating the work towards open access to research data.

2016 also saw SND begin an extensive collaboration with Swedish universities and other key players to develop a work plan for 2018–2025. The work plan was submitted to the Swedish Research Council early March and describes how SND and collaborating universities will strengthen secure access to high quality research data.

Max Petzold explains that the the proposed "new" SND would be distributed over a number of the largest universities, providing a broad range of national expert knowledge from different research fields and types of research data.

Another important initiative during 2016 was to extend the scope of SND to encompass other disciplines than humanities, social sciences and health sciences. A milestone in this effort was the inclusion of Environment Climate Data Sweden (ECDS) in SND.

"After all the intensive work during 2016, I am convinced that SND and its network of universities are now well prepared to enter the next phase of development towards Open Science" states Max Petzold.

Find out more and download the annual report here.

Spread the news on Twitter.