Effective as of September 22, 2025 | Change history
Contents
1. Terms and definitions
As defined in the General Terms of Use for CSC’s Services for Research and in the Terms of Use for Fairdata IDA, Qvain, Etsin, and Metax Services. In addition the following Terms and Definitions are used:
- “Organisation use rights” refers to the organisation’s right to use the Fairdata Services owned by the Ministry of Education and Culture (Minedu) in accordance with the Terms of Use, this Use Policy, and the service description. As part of the organisation’s IDA use rights, the organisation has an IDA storage quota, which it allocates to the service users.
- “IDA storage space” refers to the space granted by an organisation to a CSC project (users) using the IDA Service for the storage of research data and related materials. Each CSC project has a responsible person who is a member of the project.
2. Principles
The Fairdata IDA, Qvain, Etsin, and Metax Services are available to researchers and other actors from all Finnish universities and state research institutions, as well as their collaboration partners, in accordance with this Use Policy and the service description. The Ministry of Education and Culture can also grant additional user rights to the services. The services are provided free of charge to their users and are intended for research data and metadata, as defined in this Use Policy and in the service descriptions. In addition, certain functionalities and views are openly available to everyone.
The organisation and the user are responsible for ensuring that the data stored or transmitted to the Fairdata Services are available to the organisation or user with the necessary rights to process it as specified in the service description and Privacy Statement.
Fairdata Services are organised by the Ministry of Education and Culture (“Minedu”) and produced by CSC – IT Center for Science.
2.1. Fairdata IDA
The Ministry of Education and Culture has granted organisation use rights to the IDA Service as defined in this Use Policy. The current status of granted organisation use rights and quotas can be viewed on the fairdata.fi website. Organisations may apply for additional organisation-specific IDA storage quota. See detailed information on how to apply for additional organisation specific IDA quota. CSC processes the organisation’s applications as authorized by the service owner, the Ministry of Education and Culture.
Organisations allocate Fairdata IDA storage space for their users within the limits of their organisation-specific use rights. Access to the Fairdata IDA Service and the associated storage space is granted by an IDA contact person designated by each organisation. Terms of Use for Fairdata IDA, Qvain, Etsin, and Metax Services must be met when granting the storage space. The General Terms of Use for CSC’s Services for Research are included as part of the service terms.
IDA Users belong to one or more CSC projects within the IDA Service. There can be users from different organisations within the same CSC project. Collaborators, both foreign and Finnish, operating in the Finnish research system may be added as members of a CSC project using IDA. The Project Manager of each project using IDA decides who has access to the CSC project’s IDA storage space.
Data owners decide the openness and use policies of their datasets. IDA stores users’ content in accordance with the service description.
Organisations have the right to increase or decrease the IDA storage space allocated to their projects within the limits of their organisation-specific use rights. IDA contact persons in organisations can monitor the usage of granted IDA storage spaces to free up unused space if necessary.
If needed, the IDA access rights, IDA storage space, and the stored data under an organisation’s access rights can be removed by the IDA contact person of the organisation. The termination of service usage and content removal will be done in accordance with the General Terms of Use for CSC’s Services for Research and with the Terms of Use for Fairdata IDA, Qvain, Etsin, and Metax Services.
If necessary, the Fairdata IDA contact person must transfer the role to another representative of the organisation.
IDA usage is monitored. If the usage of the service is significantly lower than the organisation’s IDA quota, the granted quota may be adjusted to reflect the actual usage.
2.2. Fairdata Qvain
Qvain is available for creating and editing dataset descriptions (metadata) for registered users from organisations utilising the services.
If an organisation has appointed organisational-level users for granting use rights for datasets and/or managing the descriptive metadata, they:
- have the responsibility to process the requests for downloading the data (access control),
- have the right to manage dataset descriptions (metadata).
2.3. Fairdata Etsin
The browser interface of Etsin, used for searching and browsing dataset metadata, is openly accessible. The data downloads from Etsin may be open to everyone or restricted, as determined by the dataset creator. Some features, such as downloading restricted datasets, require login.
2.4. Fairdata Metax
Published dataset metadata accessible via the Metax API are openly available without login. The Metax API interface for creating and modifying dataset descriptions (metadata) is available to registered users from organisations utilising the services.
It is also possible to import existing dataset metadata into Metax from the organisation’s own metadata repository or from other agreed external sources. The prerequisite for importing is the use of persistent identifiers in the original source. Importing existing dataset metadata must be agreed upon separately and is always implemented in collaboration with CSC’s Fairdata Service Support.
3. General
In case of discrepancy, the Finnish language version of this document shall be considered authoritative.