Utrecht University’s Research Data Management Service Used By Five Other Dutch Universities
More than 8,500 Utrecht University researchers and students already use Yoda external link, a research data management service developed at Utrecht University. From now on, researchers from five other Dutch universities will also start managing their research data in Yoda. On 23 March 2023, Leiden University, TU Eindhoven, VU Amsterdam, Wageningen University, Erasmus University, Utrecht University and SURF signed the collaboration agreement.
What is Yoda?
Yoda enables researchers to securely store, share, publish and preserve large amounts of research data during all phases of a research project. Check the website external link.
YOUth
Originally, Yoda was developed in 2015 for the YOUth research external link. This is a large-scale research project on child development. The data collected by the researchers of YOUth is extensive and privacy-sensitive. Examples are video recordings of parents with their baby, MRI scans of children and other information that can be directly traced back to a person. At the same time, there was a desire to publish the data as open and reusable as possible. To meet that demand, the Research and Data Management Services department of Utrecht University developed Yoda: an advanced digital infrastructure to secure, store, structure and share the different types of data from YOUth.
It soon became clear that more researchers were interested in using Yoda. Therefore, Yoda was further developed as a service for all researchers connected to Utrecht University. By now, 10,200 researchers and students use Yoda. These include 8,500 UU’ers and 1,700 external partners. In total, they currently have 3 petabytes (3,000,000 gigabytes) of data stored in Yoda. By comparison: 1 petabyte is equivalent to storing about 250 million photos taken with a smartphone.
FAIR and open
On 23 March, the Yoda collaboration was secured
Making data and software FAIR is one of the five themes of Utrecht University’s Open Science programme external link. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Lazlo Westerhof, product manager and lead developer of Yoda: “Yoda supports research teams with workflows to make their data FAIR and openly available. For example, do you want to make your data reusable for others? In Yoda, you quickly add a license.”
Broad cooperation
From now on, researchers from Leiden University, TU Eindhoven, VU Amsterdam, Wageningen University and the Erasmus University will also start managing their data in Yoda. SURF external link will provide service and support to these five institutions. The cooperation was secured at a festive meeting on 23 March in the University Hall of Utrecht University.
Frank Heere, department head of Research and Data Management Services: “With this collaboration, we are taking an important step in the transition towards open science and FAIR data. Together with all the partners, we are further developing Yoda. By building on each other’s work, we can achieve more.”