IDA – Safe storage for FAIR research data

Fairdata IDA (ida.fairdata.fi) is a continuous service for safe research data storage, offered free of charge to Finnish universities, universities of applied sciences and state research institutes.

IDA enables saving, organizing and sharing data within the project group and storing the data in an immutable state. Use of the service requires that the stored data are described as research dataset with Fairdata Qvain tool. The described data can be set openly available with Fairdata Qvain for anyone to download or its availability can be restricted. The data owner decides on the openness and usage policies for their data.

IDA service stores the data continuously or until it’s transferred to the Digital Preservation Service for Research Data, provided that the Terms of Use are met.

  • Before the data stored in IDA can be made openly accessible, descriptive information (metadata) is added to the data with the research dataset description tool Qvain.
  • The research dataset published with Qvain gets a persistent identifier and a landing page in Etsin. This makes the dataset findable for others, and enables re-use of the data and creating a scientific reference. The files linked to the published dataset can be set openly available. It’s also possible to publish only the metadata of the dataset.

IDA can be used either with a user friendly browser UI or command line tools. Read more about the different UIs from the user guide.

Information on IDA’s maintenance breaks.

More information

Below there are two introduction videos to the IDA service. Click “CC” to turn subtitles on/off. Read the text versions of the videos.

Contact information

CSC customer support
servicedesk@csc.fi
+358 9 457 2821
Weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4 PM

IDA is organised by the Ministry of Education and Culture to actors within the Finnish research system. The service is produced by CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd.