data.sciencespo.fr data now accessible via Recherche Data Gouv

As of February 2023, thanks to a component developed by CDSP’s digital projects team, data from the data.sciencespo portal are harvested and signposted in the “catalogue” module of the national Recherche Data Gouv repository.

Having these data signposted in Recherche Data Gouv, the national ecosystem dedicated to shared and open research data, will increase the visibility of these datasets and help to make science more open, more transparent and more cumulative to the benefit of all.

A noteworthy contribution to a wider dissemination of the social science research data collected or processed at Sciences Po.

CDSP, a major support for data.sciencespo.fr

The social science data repository data.sciencespo (https://data.sciencespo.fr/) is a platform that facilitates the visibility, valorisation, sharing and preservation of social science research data collected or processed at Sciences Po, as well as at other institutions.

CDSP is a major contributor to data.sciencespo via its Databank; in addition it is responsible for managing and developing the data.sciencespo data platform. In this role, it specifies and maintains configurations (in particular the configuration of the metadata model), coordinates Dataverse version updates in collaboration with DSI  (the information systems department, which manages the IT infrastructure) and with DRIS (the resources and scientific information department, which participates in the  deposit tests on new versions of the data repository).

In order to contribute to the spread of data.sciencespo.fr data to other data access platforms, CDSP also develops projects to enable different national (Recherche Data Gouv, Isidore) and international (Catalogue CESSDA, OpenAire) platforms to harvest the warehouse’s metadata in accordance with the OAI-PMH protocol.

The specificity of Data Gouv Recherche

According to the founding principle of subsidiarity that governs the Recherche Data Gouv research data portal, every higher education or research institution can ask for a page to be created where its catalogue’s metadata can be displayed.

To make it possible for data.sciences.po data to be harvested by Recherche Data Gouv, CDSP’s engineers had to develop a new Python component in order to align the metadata schema used by data.sciencespo with that of the national data repository.

Supporting open science

In keeping with open science principles, the software component developed by CDSP’s engineers is available on CDSP’s Github repo  or else from HAL so that it can be reused and modified by other projects.