Deposit data
FORS has obtained, for the second time, the CoreTrustSeal certification.
The CoreTrustSeal is a globally recognized certification awarded to organizations that have demonstrated their dedication to responsible data stewardship and excellence in data management practices. By obtaining this seal, FORS has officially confirmed its adherence to rigorous international standards and best practices for ensuring the authenticity, integrity, and reliability of research data. You can see a copy of the certificat here.
- SWISSUbase is meant for all social science disciplines and is suitable for depositing all types of quantitative and qualitative data, including sensitive and experimental data.
For more details, see our Acquisition policy.
- Trustworthy: SWISSUbase is a reliable and sustainable Swiss platform recommended by the SNSF. As a partner, FORS adheres to FAIR principles and holds the CoreTrustSeal certification, reinforcing the platform’s commitment to secure data preservation. Several options are available to maintain control over your data, including prior agreements, embargoed data, and restrictions of use, with your rights protected through user agreements and contracts.
- Interoperable with EU and International platforms: Across disciplines, our general metadata model is based on DublinCore and DataCite metadata standards, a key requirement for interoperability. Social sciences metadata is harvested by the CESSDA catalogue and linguistics metadata is harvested by CLARIN. In 2025, humanities metadata will be harvested by DARIAH.
- Expert curation and support: Data experts perform quality assurance checks (data curation) for all submitted projects and datasets. All submissions are thoroughly checked for quality, metadata coherence, and long-term preservation. A DOI is assigned to each dataset, ensuring increased visibility through citations. Additionally, data experts provide support throughout your data’s entire life cycle, ensuring high-quality documentation following international standards.
- Free data access and deposit: Researchers in the social sciences domain from any Swiss higher education institution can deposit data for free. Data access in the public catalogue is also free, while restricted access data is available to verified researchers from Swiss higher education institutions which is verified during platform log-in.
Visit SWISSUbase Info website to read more about the Platform benefits.
- You must provide secondary users with all the information they need to understand and make appropriate use of the data you share. This means that your data files must be cleaned, anonymized, and accompanied with suitable documentation.
For more information on data preparation, see our guide Preparing your data for deposit in SWISSUbase.
- To deposit your data in SWISSUbase, you must first create a project, then a dataset. The latter consists of at least one data set and the associated documentation.
For more information on data deposit, visit the SWISSUbase Help Centre.
To access European social science research data, consult the data catalog of CESSDA, the Consortium of European Archives with which FORS collaborates and which contains the metadata of all data held by partner archives.
Data Live
Join Data Live, your monthly Q&A on data management and data sharing. Experts from FORS Data Management & Archive Services answer your questions.
Whether you are tackling data management challenges, navigating ethical considerations, or looking for best practices in data sharing, this is your chance to get expert insights in real time.
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When? Every second Thursday of the month, 13:00–14:00 CET.
Bâtiment Géopolis,
+41 (0)21 692 37 30
