National resources: Sweden
Introduction
This page provides a general overview of national resources on research data management (RDM) in Sweden, directed towards researchers and official collaborators. National goals and long term data management achievements are provided in the Research Bill 2020/21-60. The Swedish ELIXIR node National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) offers support and training in data management to life science researchers in Sweden, in collaboration with the Data Centre at Science for Life Laboratory (SciLifeLab).
Funders with policies
The Swedish Research Council has a government mandate to coordinate and promote Sweden’s work on introducing open access to research data, with the goal for transition to open access to research data to be fully implemented by 2026. As of 2019 all who receive grants from the council must have a data management plan (DMP), written according to their DMP template, which is a partially reworked version of Science Europe’s “Core Requirements for Data Management Plans”.
Formas - The Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences and Spatial Planning - has a policy on open access to research data, and requires that a DMP is written and can be shown upon request.
Authorities and Regulations
If personal data is processed in your research, contact your institute’s Data Protection Officer, and if available, the Research Data Office (see list at end of page), for guidance on ethical and legal compliance. The following is a list of ethical and legal committees, authorities and regulations of interest:
Authorities
Regulations
- The Ethics Review Act (in Swedish)
- The Patient Data Act (in Swedish)
- The Biobank Act (in Swedish)
- The Archives Act (in Swedish)
- Lag (2018:218) med kompletterande bestämmelser till EU:s dataskyddsförordning
Domain-specific infrastructures and resources
The SciLifeLab Data Centre provides services for IT and data management, including Data Stewardship Wizard instance (for writing data management plans), the Swedish COVID-19 data portal, and the SciLifeLab Data Repository.
Data stewards at NBIS (ELIXIR-SE) provide consultation and support services regarding data management questions, including e.g. guidance when writing data management plans and when doing submissions to domain-specific repositories. For information about this and other resources at NBIS please see the Data Management page. An upcoming resource is the Swedish Sensitive Data Archive, a secure data archive and sharing platform for sensitive datasets, which will be integrated with the Federated EGA network.
The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) is a national research infrastructure that provides resources and user support for large scale computation and data storage to meet the needs of researchers from all scientific disciplines and from all over Sweden. Of particular use for life science researchers is the SNIC-SENS project which provides high-performance computing resources for analyzing sensitive data.
Swedish National Data Service (SND) with its network of almost 40 higher education institutions and public research institutes, provides researchers with a coordinated and quality-assured system for finding, describing, and sharing research data, nationally as well as internationally. The SND network has agreed to create local units for managing research data (Data Access Units (DAUs)), with the main task to assist researchers in their respective organisation in making research data as accessible as possible, via training and support in data management. SND also provides a DMP checklist to support researchers in writing data management plans.
List of universities with established Research Data Offices or Data Access Units (DAUs), with links to local online resources and contact information:
- Chalmers University of Technology - Research Data Support - dataoffice@chalmers.se
- Karolinska Institutet - Research Data Support - rdo@ki.se
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology - Research Data Support - researchdata@kth.se
- Lund University - Research Data Support - See web page for contact information
- Stockholm University - Research Data Support - opendata@su.se
- Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences - Research Data Support - dms@slu.se
- Umeå University - Research Data Support - See web page for contact information
- University of Gothenburg - Research Data Support - researchdata@gu.se
- Uppsala University - Research Data Support - dataoffice@uu.se
Relevant tools and resources
Skip tool table| Resource | Description | Related pages |
|---|---|---|
| DS-Wizard ELIXIR-SE | Data Stewardship Wizard is a tool to be used when planning for data management, including generating a data management plan (DMP). This instance provides guidance with focus towards Swedish life science researchers, including national resources.
Data Stewardship Wizard
|
Data management plan |
| SciLifeLab Data Repository (Figshare) | A repository for publishing any kind of research-related data, e.g. documents, figures, or presentations.
FigShare
|
Existing data Data publication |
| NBIS Data Management Consultation | Free consultation service regarding data management questions in life science research. |
Data management plan Data publication Sensitive data |
| Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal | The Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal provides information, guidelines, tools and services to support researchers to utilise Swedish and European infrastructures for data sharing. |
COVID-19 Data Portal Human data Sensitive data Existing data Data publication |
| SNIC | The Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC) is a national research infrastructure that makes available large-scale high-performance computing resources, storage capacity, and advanced user support, for Swedish research. |
Data analysis Data storage |
| SciLifeLab Data Guidelines | A data type centric resource that provides guidance on good data management practices during the data life cycle, including available infrastructures. |
|
| Human Data Guidelines | Guidelines as well as further information on legal considerations when working with human biomedical data. |
Human data Sensitive data |
