The SND Consortium has two new members: KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg.
KTH and Chalmers were elected to the consortium during the SND Meeting, and as a result SND’s operations will be governed by nine of Sweden’s largest universities.
—We are very happy to welcome the technical universities into the consortium; this means that we strengthen our competencies and reach in this field, where for instance machine-generated data are a relatively new domain for us, says SND Director Max Petzold.
”Different infrastructures need to come together”
Maria Haglund, Head Librarian in the KTH Library, is also pleased that the university is now a part of the SND collaboration.
—It’s very exciting! The different types of research infrastructures in Sweden need to collaborate more. We want to contribute with our expertise and research to help SND develop in a direction that is relevant to our field, she says.
Maria Haglund looks forward to finding good common solutions for data management and storage, that also take into account the differences between various scientific disciplines and research areas.
—There is no one-size-fits-all solution, but we want to create systems that have as much in common as possible. This is especially important with regard to storage options; unless the universities act now, we risk falling into the hands of private operators. This is already a very real problem for some researchers; they are not allowed to publish if they cannot point to a storage where the data are accessible.
Maria Haglund hopes that KTH will have much to learn from the collaboration within SND. The university has only had a research support office for about a year, whereas several of the other universities in the SND consortium and network have been working with research data support for longer, and have had dedicated research data units for several years.
—We look forward to exchanging knowledge and experiences in the consortium, and to learn from those who have developed further than we have, says Maria Haglund.
New recruitments in SND’s Gothenburg office
The SND Meeting also approved an expansive budget for SND. This means that the SND office in Gothenburg will receive three research data advisors in natural science and medicine, an IT developer, and a communications officer.