ACOUA: Long-term preservation


At EPFL, the Library Research Data Management team is at your disposal to provide you with expert advice, support, and solutions. For the long-term preservation of research data and code, the EPFL community benefits from ACOUA, the institutional archive managed by EPFL Library in partnership with the Information Systems (VPO-SI).


Data preservation does not only mean storing data safely, but it also implies that data will remain accessible and reusable in the long term (for several years or even forever) ensuring:

  • Intellectual interpretability (by providing sufficient metadata and documentation)
  • Technical readability (by using for example appropriate formats)
  •  Integrity (by replication of the data and checksum usage)

Long-term preservation should be planned from the beginning of the project.

The Data Management Plan is a useful tool to describe the preservation strategies that the researchers would like to put in place and to make monitoring during the project lifespan easier.
In order to preserve data correctly, appraisal and selection are needed to determine which data will be ultimately devoted to long-term conservation or eliminated, how long, in which format, and where.

This page focuses on the institutional archive made available at the EPFL, but other tools exist, depending on your needs.

 

The EPFL research data archive

The EPFL research community benefits from ACOUA (Academic Output Archive), the institutional archive for the long-term preservation of research data and code. With specialized infrastructure and dedicated support staff, it allows for the long-term integrity of your datasets. 

Why archiving research data

Why using ACOUA

There are many instances where you or your research group should use ACOUA to preserve your relevant research data:

  • archive the entirety of a dataset underlying your publication
  • archive datasets of a finished research project
  • archive datasets of a collaborator leaving EPFL
  • get space for large datasets that need preservation
  • preserve reference raw data useful during your research
  • get expert support for data curation

What you get

In addition to the proper digital infrastructure, we also offer professional  and tailored support:

  • trustworthy, safe and EPFL-backed environment 
  • free for EPFL researchers
  • up to 10TB per archived dataset
  • help in data curation prior to archival
  • periodic integrity audits and curation actions of your datasets  
  • periodic reports on the state of your preserved datasets
  • referral of your datasets on Infoscience
  • possibility to publish your datasets for you on Zenodo (size limits)

Access to ACOUA

Restricted to EPFL staff with authorization provided by [email protected]

Contact

[email protected]


+41 21 693 21 56


Access map