DANS: Data Archiving and Networking Services
DANS promotes sustained access to digital research data. For this purpose, DANS encourages researchers to archive and reuse data in a sustained manner, e.g. through the online archiving system EASY (https://easy.dans.knaw.nl). DANS also provides access, via NARCIS.nl (http://www.narcis.nl/), to thousands of scientific datasets, e-publications and other research information in the Netherlands. DANS is an institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and is located in The Hague.
As part of its mission, DANS supports the Open Access principle, while being aware of the fact that not all data can be freely available and without limitations at all times. Even so, it is important that research data that are not available (yet) or only available to a limited degree are archived in a sustained manner. Therefore, DANS applies the principle ‘Open if possible, protected if necessary’. To ensure that archived data can still be found, accessed and used in the future, DANS developed the Data Seal of Approval (www.datasealofapproval.org). This data seal can be requested and granted to data repositories that meet a number of clear criteria in the field of quality, preservation and accessibility of data. The DANS archiving system EASY has acquired the Data Seal of Approval. Stimulating other repositories to acquire the Data Seal of Approval as well as acquiring a DIN or ISO certification for EASY itself are among DANS’s strategic goals for 2015.
DANS participates in several national and international research infrastructure projects, such as CLARIN, DARIAH, CESSDA, EHRI, OpenAIRE, Data without Boundaries, APARSEN, and EU-DAT. This way DANS supplies services to many disciplines, including the study of literature and linguistics.