FAQ

DASSI (Data Archive for Social Science in Italy) is a data archive for social sciences and is the Italian national service provider of the European Research Infrastructure CESSDA ERIC.

The main difference lies in the activities of data curation. Repositories preserve data as deposited, while data archives perform all necessary transformations to ensure their long-term preservation, accurate metadata creation and quality checks on the deposited data.

DASSI ensures long-term research data preservation, their sharing, and their compliance with FAIR principles. The objective is to enhance the value of deposited data, improve their visibility and accessibility, and enable users to use them correctly and independently.

The acronym FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. DASSI stores data that adhere to these principles.

No. DASSI accepts only anonymized data, which means data that don’t allow for individuals’ identification. Consequently, deposited data cannot contain any direct identifiers (such as name or tax code) or indirect identifiers (i.e., information that, when combined with other public sources, could enable individuals’ identification).

Generally, data ownership belongs to the creator of the data, from whom the copyright derives. However, the copyright holder could also be the institution for which the data creator works or the research funding entity that produced them. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly ascertain the data ownership rights by checking one's employment contract, agreements with funders, or the policies of one's affiliated institution.

No. By depositing the data, DASSI is granted a license to store and disseminate the data, as specified in the Deposit Agreement, but all copyright rights remain with the owner.

The data is accessible to anyone who requests it, according to the conditions established by the end-user license.

DASSI distributes the data in an open format. Quantitative data (matrices) are generally distributed in CSV format and are accompanied by import syntax for major statistical analysis software used in social sciences (SPSS, Stata, and R). Qualitative data are distributed in ODT format.

It depends on the license established by the data owner. DASSI promotes the use of Creative Commons licenses, which always allow data sharing. However, it is possible to define ad hoc licenses with specific limitations.

No, the data stored and distributed by DASSI are free, and there is no cost associated with accessing these resources.

DASSI is a data archive for social sciences and, therefore, promotes data deposition for research produced by all researchers in this scientific domain.

DASSI, as the Italian Service Provider of the CESSDA infrastructure, accepts research data related to Italian society (i.e., data concerning Italy, not necessarily exclusively) or collected by Italian researchers in the field of social sciences. To learn about the criteria for selecting deposited data and accepted formats, please refer to the Data Acquisition Policy.

Each stored data is assigned a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which allows for its unique and persistent identification and should be included in the citation. The online catalog also provides guidance for the correct data citation.

No. DASSI manages data in Italian and English, so all materials (documentation accompanying the data as well as the actual data) should be deposited in one of these languages. The adoption of international standards, controlled vocabularies, and thesauri will facilitate the easy translation of metadata into different languages, making the data interoperable.