The Italian Archive
DASSI is the first Italian professional archive dedicated to the social sciences, designed to ensure proper care, secure preservation, and long-term enhancement of data. DASSI is also the Italian Service Provider for the European infrastructure CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives).
Founded in 2021 through a Joint Research Unit between the University of Milano-Bicocca (UNIMIB) and the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), it has been online since 2023 and today represents a leading infrastructure at the national level.
• The service is free of charge and open to the scientific community
• A public service for stronger and more collaborative research.
DASSI provides validated, well-documented, and freely downloadable datasets, promoting a culture of data sharing and reuse. This vision contributes to:
• strengthening the quality and transparency of social research;
• increasing the scientific impact of studies;
• fostering open science practices in line with international standards.
Who we address
The primary Designated Community of DASSI consists of researchers working in the social sciences (both academic and non-academic). However, DASSI is also aimed at students, teachers, educators, politicians, media representatives, journalists, ordinary citizens, or anyone interested in using archived data. The distributed data is always accompanied by detailed contextual documentation to ensure understandability within the target community.
An archive, not just a repository
📄DASSI Archive is much more than a simple data repository. Data management and subject-matter specialists ensure:
- Thorough quality controls
- Preparation of datasets for long-term scientific reuse
- Anonymized and secure data, compliant with ethical and regulatory standards
- Accurate documentation to guarantee understanding and replicability
- Greater citability through DOI assignment.
🤝 The DASSI team provides qualified assistance throughout the entire process, from data preparation to final publication, including:
- Assistance during the deposit phase
- Selection of the most appropriate usage license
- Data quality checks
- Support with scientific documentation
🏛️ The infrastructure enables compliance with European open access requirements through:
- Data management aligned with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)
- Use of open licenses, open formats, and open-source software
- Automatic metadata harvesting to enhance visibility and dissemination
🌍DASSI promotes research data accessibility to facilitate replicability and validation. Data are available through an online catalogue that also feeds into the European CESSDA catalogue.
The archive ensures:
- Metadata compliant with the DDI (Data Documentation Initiative) standard and controlled vocabularies for high interoperability
- DOI assignment for long-term traceability
- Long-term preservation following the OAIS (Open Archival Information System) model
- Responsible data deposition, safeguarding personal data and intellectual property