Basic information

Data Center Serbia for Social Sciences (DCS) is the national data center of the Republic of Serbia established in 2014 as an organizational unit of the Institute of Economic Sciences in Belgrade with the aim of identifying significant data sources within a wide range of disciplines of social sciences, collecting and preparing data for the long-term preservation and enable dissemination for scientific research and academic education.

DCS was established as a result of the FP7 SERSCIDA project – Support for the Establishment of National / Regional Social Science Data Archives, in the period 2012-2014. SERSCIDA was conceived as a strategic project for cooperation and knowledge exchange between EU countries that are involved in the work of the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC) and the Western Balkan countries (Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina).

Further development of the DCS was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, within f the SCOPES project framework and the SEEDS project (South-Eastern European Data Services), in the period 2015-2017. The project aimed to expand the efforts made during the SERSCIDA project. In the framework of the SEEDS project implementation, IEN also implemented the RRPP Data Rescue project, in which extremely valuable data sets were collected from the research realized through the Regional Research Promotional Program – RRPP.

In the same period, DCS participated in the HORIZON2020 project CESSDA SaW (Strengthening and Widening). After the successful establishment of the CESSDA ERIC consortium in a new organizational form in 2013, there was a need to strengthen and expand the digital archives network in order to ensure sustainability and coverage across Europe. The main objective of the project was to provide the conditions and make initial steps towards creating reliable data services in social sciences across the entire European Research Area (ERA), which will be able to meet the needs of the next generation researchers.

As a result of devoted work and efforts on the development of research infrastructure, the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia supported the work of the DCS, and in February 2019 the Republic of Serbia become the member of CESSDA ERIC, and the Data Center Serbia for Social Science is appointed as a national Service Provider in the field of collecting, archiving and sharing research data in the academic community.

Mission

The mission of the Data Center of Serbia for Social Sciences is to provide support to researchers in the Republic of Serbia in the process of data management through the development of reliable infrastructure and the increase and sharing of knowledge in this field.

Vision

Our vision is to become the center of Serbia and the region that will bring together researchers who carry out scientific work concerning the principles of Open Science, Open Access and FAIR Data Standards.