Introduction
This page provides useful information and resources about research data management in Switzerland. Check the overview of ELIXIR Switzerland and its services.
Governance and Funders
SERI
The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) within the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research EAER is the federal government’s specialised agency for national and international matters concerning education, research and innovation policy.
SNFS
The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) supports scientific research in all academic disciplines – from physics to medicine to sociology. At the end of 2021, the SNSF was funding 5,700 projects involving more than 20,000 researchers, which makes it the leading Swiss institution for promoting scientific research.
Swissuniversities
Swissuniversities is the common voice of the Swiss universities and promotes cooperation and coordination between the universities and the various types of universities.
ETH Domain
The ETH Domain falls under the authority of the Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research (EAER). It comprises Switzerland’s two federal institutes of technology (FIT) – ETH Zurich and the EPFL in Lausanne – and four research institutes: the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology (Eawag).
National initiatives
Swiss Open Research Data In 2021, the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), the Swiss Conference of Rectors of Higher Education Institutions (swissuniversities), the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and Switzerland’s two federal institutes of technology (ETHZ in Zurich and EPFL in Lausanne) signed an agreement to develop a national strategy on open research data.
The Swiss ORD Strategy provides a framework for the development of practices built around sharing research data in Switzerland, and for governing the services and infrastructures that support researchers and enable ORD practices. It should enable Switzerland to implement a coherent and ambitious open science policy in line with European and global developments.
SPHN - Swiss Personalized Health Network SPHN is a national initiative under the leadership of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS). In collaboration with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics it contributes to the development, implementation and validation of coordinated data infrastructures in order to make health-relevant data interoperable and shareable for research in Switzerland.
Regulations and policies on research data
Funder policy
Institutional policy
Institutional RDM support and services
- University of Basel
- University of Bern
- University of Fribourg
- University of Geneva
- University of Lausanne
- University of St.Gallen
- University of Zurich
- ETHZ
- EPFL
- CHUV Library (BiUM)
- Libr4RI - Library for the research institutes of the ETH domain (EAWAG, EMPA, PSI & WSL)
- SWITCH - secure infrastructure for data sharing, storage and archive
Tools and resources
Tailored to users in Switzerland
Developed and/or deployed by institutions and organisations in Switzerland.
Skip tool tableResource | Description | Related pages | Registry |
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OLOS | OLOS is a Swiss-based data management portal, to help Swiss researchers safely manage, publish and preserve their data. |
Data storage Data publication | |
SWISSUbase | SWISSUbase is a national cross-disciplinary solution for Swiss universities and other research organizations in need of local institutional data repositories for their researchers. The platform relies on international archiving standards and processes to ensure that data are preserved and accessible in the long-term. |
Data storage Data publication | |
OpenRDM.swiss | openRDM.swiss offers research data management as a service to the scientific community, based on the powerful openBIS platform. |
Data analysis | |
Renku | An open-source knowledge infrastructure for collaborative and reproducible data science. |
Data analysis | |
BioMedIT | A secure IT network for the responsible processing of health-related data. |
Human data Data analysis Data sensitivity | |
Swiss Pathogen Surveillance Platform (SPSP) | A secure One-health online platform that enables near real-time sharing under controlled access of pathogen whole genome sequences (WGS) and their associated clinical/epidemiological metadata. Since 20221 it has centralized and processed all SARS-CoV-2 sequencing data within the national genomic surveillance program. |
COVID-19 Data Portal Existing data | |
DORA | Digit Object Repository at the Libr4RI (4 ETH Domain Research Institutes, that are EAWAG, EMPA, PSI, WSL). |
Data publication | |
UNIL DMP Online | This instance of DMPonline is provided by the Service des ressources informationnelles et archives (UNIRIS) of the University of Lausanne (UNIL) to help its community of researchers to write a Data Management Plan (DMP).
DMPonline
|
Data management plan | |
SIB/Vital-IT Canvas Generator | This is a tool to help scientists generate data management plans for SNSF -unded projects. The Word document produced complies with the SNSF instructions for creating DMPs. |
Data management plan |