Open and Discover Data

Sharing and re-using data are increasingly important parts of the scientific process. When considering whether you should make your data available for reuse, the rule of thumb is to make the data as open as possible, as closed as necessary. Remember to consider intellectual property rights, legal and ethical issues when opening data. If it's not possible to open the data, it's recommended to open at least the descriptive metadata.

Services for opening and publishing research data

Services listed below are Finnish or produced in collaboration with CSC. Services are free-of-charge for end users. In addition to the services listed here, there are multiple recommended repositories available. You can search for suitable options at Re3data, the Registry of Research Data Repositories . If possible, use discipline-specific repositories for your data. We recommend contacting the data support of your home organisation for more guidance in opening research data.

Social sciences and language resources

Deposition and resources for digital humanities, interviews, and language research (in text, speech, and video formats).

Finnish Social Science Data Archive (Tietoarkisto) »
The Language Bank of Finland (Kielipankki) »

Sensitive data

If you plan to share or publish your sensitive data, you must ensure that the data is appropriate and safe to share.

Read more about Sensitive Data services »

When publishing or opening research data, remember to share it together with its descriptive information (metadata) so that the data can be interpreted correctly. The published data should also have a persistent identifier, which enables citations as well as a license. These allow other people to discover your data and make it reusable. You can read our guide to publishing research data in CSC Docs.

Benefits of opening data. 1) Visibility for your research: new opportunities for collaboration, more merits and funding opportunities through increased visibility. 2) Discoverability of data by search engines (PIDs), citation system and bookkeeping of data downloads. 3) Efficient use of research funds. 4) Comply with funders' mandates and publishers' requirements. 5) Transparency of data: reproducible results and new analyses to be conducted. 6) Access and make use of the data even after the project. License: CC BY 4.0.

License: CC BY 4.0

Discover research data

When utilising and reusing data collected or produced by others, the origin, content, location, license, restrictions of use, and other necessary information are needed. Search services include descriptive information (metadata) on research datasets. The better the description of the dataset is, the easier it is to find and use it. Existing research datasets may be available for reuse.

Fairdata Etsin – a research data finder

With Etsin you can find research datasets from any field of science. The published metadata of datasets is open to everyone. How and who accesses the underlying research data is decided by data publishers.

Go to Fairdata Etsin »

EUDAT B2FIND

B2FIND is a discovery service based on the metadata steadily harvested from research data collections from EUDAT data centres and other repositories.

Go to B2FIND »
More about EUDAT services for Finnish users »

Datasets by discipline

We host or provide access to various datasets on different platforms. You can find datasets for biosciences, chemistry, digital humanities, geosciences, language research, and social sciences.

AVAA open data publishing platform »
Paituli spatial data service »
Datasets available for computing (by disclipline) »