Feedback from the SRDSN Spring Meeting in Zurich
On March 27, 2025, the Swiss Research Data Support Network (SRDSN) held its Spring Meeting at the University of Zurich. The hybrid event gathered around 60 professionals in Zurich, with around 20 people attending on Zoom. Participants came from various institutions to discuss advancements and challenges in research data management.
The day started with a welcome and introduction by the Operational Committee, followed by a presentation on the SRDSN website by Christina Besmer. Everyone is invited to contribute to the website with events. The website will - soon - offer notifications to registered members. Patricia Palagi then provided insights into the European and international landscape of data support networks. The report detailing this landscape was created during the SRDSN project (WP7). The SRSDN wishes to connect and collaborate with those networks in the future. For this reason, speakers representing those networks had been invited to this meeting as well as the previous one.
Veerle van den Eynden shared experiences from five years of the Flemish Research Data Network, focusing on people, policy, and infrastructure. Francesco Varrato discussed RDM services for data ethics in practice, highlighting practical applications and decisions to be made. For him, there is a void, as “The practicalities are too often lost in translation”. This gap represents an opportunity: user-friendly solutions should be developed and made available to our users.
After a coffee break, Vassilios Ioannidis introduced the DSW / FAIR Wizard, a highly configurable tool to create Data Management Plans (DMPs). They would like to know the interest for a Swiss instance of such a tool amongst Swiss institutions (survey here). Clemens Trautwein and Iris Lindenmann presented AKORD, the Working Group Open Research Data of the SLiNER libraries and its recent work. AKORD recently contributed to, to a report on enhancing ORD in Switzerland, which covers five core areas: Data Archiving & Sharing, User Access, Technical Interoperability, Reuse, and alignment with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). A mailing list is available to people wishing to follow AKORD’s work and news.
The afternoon sessions started with updates by the Steering Committee, and the election of Constance Delamadeleine (HES-SO) as a new Steering Committee member. It was followed by an overview of the SWISSUbase Data Curation Network by Penelope Weissmann, and their services to the social sciences, and linguistic community, as well as their institutional Data Service Unit in places at UNIL, and UNINE. After her, Sebastian Sigloch from Switch presented the Openness Assistant, based on OpenAlex data.
The day came to an end with a full of word-puns talk by Hugo Hueber on CORV, a data-privacy transcription tool developed at University of Lausanne and based on Whisper and WhisperX. Easy to use and much cheaper than the online commercial equivalent solutions, the tool sparked considerable interest among the audience and might be available outside UNIL in the future.
To close the day, Gero Schreier and Igor Sarman presented work underway on the 3 mandates given by swissuniversities to SRDSN. Reports will be out in June. Finally, the event ended with announcements and an outlook by the Operational Committee including a save the date and a call to express interest to host future spring meetings.
Overall, the SRDSN Spring Meeting 2025 provided a valuable platform for knowledge exchange and networking among professionals dedicated to improving research data management practices. The presentations are available on Switchdrive and will be uploaded to Zenodo.
The next SRDSN meeting will take place in Bern, on November 27th 2025. Save the date, as it will provide an opportunity to also attend the award ceremony of the National Prize for Open Research Data, taking place on that same day, in Bern.
