Flagships
The SND office and the universities in the SND Consortium work together to develop tools and methods to make it easier for researchers to share and reuse data. A key part of this work involves the so-called Flagships.
SND’s Flagships projects are time-limited initiatives designed to support open access to research data in a broad sense. They may be carried out in collaboration between Consortium universities and other higher education institutions or research organizations. A central idea behind the Flagship projects is that their results should benefit a wider audience than just the institutions and organizations that lead them.
Ongoing Flagship projects
Inter Arts Center and Lund University
IAC Art Files – A new solution for artistic research data
IAC Art Files is a joint initiative by the Inter Arts Center and the Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts at Lund University, focusing on the management of artistic research data and outputs in relation to the FAIR principles and the requirements for open research. As SND’s Flagship at Lund University for 2025–26, a system and portal will be developed to form the basis of a new, domain-specific repository. This repository will be built, tested, and integrated at the Faculty, with the potential for national use and further development after the end of the project.
The purpose of this project is to create solutions for a domain-oriented, stable, and sustainable system for categorizing, describing, sharing, and displaying artistic research data, compatible with other systems within the university and with SND’s portal Researchdata.se. Project goals include delivering technical solutions, establishing administrative procedures, investigating ethical and legal aspects, exploring the conceptual and practical framework of the term artistic research data, communicating opportunities to users, and evaluating the initial effort.
Contact: Hedvig Jalhed (hedvig.jalhed@mhm.lu.se)
Chalmers, GU, KTH, and the SND office
Traceable research data: Methods and recommendations for enhanced traceability and visibility of Swedish data publications
This Flagship project aims to improve the management and traceability of data publications at Swedish higher education institutions. It explores how data publications can be identified, registered, and tracked over time.
By developing methods for harvesting metadata and producing practical recommendations, the project contributes to improved traceability, visibility, and quality assurance of research data in alignment with the FAIR principles. The results will be made openly accessible in the form of current state and gap analyses, recommendations, and proposed technical solutions.
The goal of the project is to establish conditions that support national requirements for monitoring and reporting. Universities, researchers, and other stakeholders will gain support in identifying and highlighting published research data, thereby strengthening Swedish research both nationally and internationally.
Contact: Therese Tikkanen (therese.tikkanen@chalmers.se)
Karolinska Institutet
KI Data Repository – Phase 1: interim solution for local storage without integration with DORIS
The Flagship project at Karolinska Institutet aims to create a solution where KI’s researchers can securely and in a structured way store sensitive data and make them accessible through SND’s catalogue. In the first phase (the Flagship project), this is done manually via the interim solution for local storage without integration with DORIS. (DORIS is SND’s system where researchers can describe and share research data.) Phase two will involve creating a permanent local storage solution with an integration between the university storage and SND (DORIS).
The storage issue is a central part of the work at universities to make research data accessible. The results from KI’s project can demonstrate how to create functional storage systems before a final integrated data storage is in place.
Contact: Fredrik Persson (fredrik.persson@ki.se)
Stockholm University
Certification of the Bolin Centre Database – a repository for climate, environmental, and earth system data at Stockholm University
The flagship project at Stockholm University aims to make the Bolin Centre Database a CoreTrustSeal certified repository. The database already meets several of the certification requirements, but not all. By more clearly integrating the database into the university's central research support, functions such as IT support, data curation, legal support, and e-archives will become more accessible to the repository, contributing to its development towards a more sustainable organization.
One of the long-term goals of SND’s collaboration is to create certified repositories at the HEIs in the network. The certification of Bolin Centre can serve as an example of how the process can proceed, and experiences from the project can be used to facilitate future certification work at HEIs.
Contact: Merlijn de Smit (merlijn.de.smit@su.se)
Completed Flagship projects
Lund University
Preserved and accessible databases
Within the flagship project at Lund University, a process is being developed to make databases that are used and updated simultaneously accessible while preserving them in the long term. According to the inventory conducted at the university, researchers need to secure the operation and maintenance of databases over a longer period, especially after the project ends when funding is uncertain. The flagship project primarily targets researchers in the humanities and social sciences, but the results can be applied in other scientific fields.
Questions about responsibility, operations, and costs regarding the preservation of research data are relevant for all Swedish HEIs. The flagship project at Lund University can show how to work towards creating long-term technical systems and solutions for preserving databases.
Contact: Kristoffer Holmqvist (kristoffer.holmqvist@ub.lu.se)
Chalmers and KTH
Efficient reuse of administrative research information from project initiation to data publication
This project is an independent continuation of the Flagship pilot conducted by Chalmers and KTH in collaboration with SND (read the final report here). The goal is to reduce the administrative burden on researchers by reusing information about research projects through machine-readable data management plans that communicate with other research administrative systems. The project aims to develop a solution to create and fill out a data management plan using metadata from other systems, such as SweCris.
One of the benefits of the initiative is that researchers and research administrators can avoid having to manually enter the same information into multiple systems. This can increase incentives for researchers to create data management plans, as the process becomes simpler and more streamlined.
Contact: Urban Andersson (urban.andersson@chalmers.se)