Research Data Centre Qualiservice

Qualiservice is a data service center that preserves qualitative research data from the social sciences and provides them to researchers for scientific re-use. The services include personalized and study-specific advice, as well as curation and secure processing of your data for long-term preservation and secondary data analysis. Qualiservice provides research data and relevant contextual information for re-use in research and teaching. Internationally interoperable metadata ensure that all data-sets can be searched and found. Persistent identifiers (i.e., digital object identifiers, DOI) guarantee that data and details about the study remain permanently citable.

Qualiservice is operated by a consortium with a wide range of expertise in managing and archiving qualitative research data:

• The SOCIUM – Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy at the University of Bremen is accommodating the executive office. It is responsible for advisory and support services for research projects, transfers of data, data usage agreements, exchange with the scientific community, as well as cooperation with national and international partners.
• PANGAEA – the Certified World Data Center is the partner responsible for developing and implementing the specific information technology. It is a member of the International Council for Science World Data System (ICSU-WDS) as well as a certified and accredited World Data Center (WDC). Metadata created with PANGAEA are harvested by various international metadata platforms. The interoperability of metadata also allows for “cross-linking” between literature and data.
• The State and University Library Bremen (SuUB) contributes to Qualiservice with its expertise in creating and developing metadata for qualitative research data. Moreover, the SuUB publishes the Qualiservice study reports, which provide contextual information on archived research data.
• In cooperation with the University Library of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Scientific Information Service Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA), Qualiservice develops workflows for the archiving and provision of ethnographic research data that are in line with methodological and ethical requirements.

Qualiservice was accredited by the RatSWD in 2019 and adheres to its quality assurance criteria. Since 2021 is Qualiservice part of the Consortium of the Social, Behavioural, Educational and Economic Sciences (KonsortSWD), which is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). As such Qualiservice coordinates two project measures with the objective to improve the data sharing services for qualitative research data. Together with further research data centers QualidataNet will be established as a central point of access to Data Sharing Services and a Research Data Management-Portfolio for qualitative research data will be developed.

Qualiservice is committed to the DFG Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Scientific Practice and takes into account the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship as well as the OECD Principles and Guidelines for Access to Research Data from Public Funding.

• Scientific-Use-Files (SUF)
• Campus-Files (CF)
• Workstations for guests in protected facilities (‘safe rooms’) allow researchers to conduct research with less anonymized data on the basis of a specific user agreement