We are very pleased to announce the launch of the Social Sciences and Digital Humanities Archive ‘SODHA’. SODHA is a data archive – an archive for datasets produced in the course of scientific investigations – in which researchers can deposit and find reusable data in any discipline of social sciences and the (digital) humanities.

Datasets published through SODHA receive a Digital Object Identifier (DOI), which makes them likelier to be harvested by search engines, thus boosting their online visibility. This not only highlights researchers’ accomplishments in the form of data collections alongside academic publications; it also makes datasets citable and findable, like other traditional sources such as articles, book chapters, books, conference proceedings, etc.

In this way data collected and prepared thanks to public funding are made accessible for reuse, and researchers’ efforts are publicly rewarded. They become thus findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable — in one word: FAIR data.

As a new service of the State Archives of Belgium, SODHA is committed to preserving research materials with the same quality standards and warranties already adopted by its home federal archive institution. SODHA also promotes open science and transparency by encouraging researchers to deposit their data under an open licence, which facilitates data reuse and enables scientific replication. SODHA relies on the open-source Web application Dataverse. Thanks to the BISHOPS project (Belgian Infrastructure for Social Sciences and Humanities Open Science), we are now broadening SODHA’s scope to include the (digital) humanities.

Would you like to browse the SODHA dataset collections or to deposit your own? Access SODHA here: https://www.sodha.be/

It is possible to follow up the project via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/social-sciences-and-digital-humanities-archive-%E2%80%93-sodha/?viewAsMember=true