Austrian Social Science Data Archive (AUSSDA)

Overview

AUSSDA – The Austrian Social Science Data Archive is a certified national research infrastructure for the social science community in Austria. Founded in 2016 and headquartered at the University of Vienna, AUSSDA serves as Austria's official representative in the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA ERIC). It offers digital archiving, data curation, and research data management services to researchers, educators, students, and media professionals across Austria.

History and Founding

AUSSDA was founded in 2016 with support from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research as Austria's service provider for the European ESFRI research infrastructure CESSDA. From its inception, AUSSDA has been integrated into the European research ecosystem. In July 2020, AUSSDA was certified with the CoreTrustSeal (CTS) as a trustworthy data repository. The archive operates from multiple university locations across Austria, including Vienna, Graz, Linz, Innsbruck, Krems, Salzburg, and Klagenfurt, as well as at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW).

Collections and Data Holdings

AUSSDA archives a wide variety of social science datasets covering topics such as public opinion, political attitudes, migration, population development, and value changes across Austrian and European society. Notable holdings include the GfK-Austria-Archive — survey studies from the former market research company GfK Austria (previously Fessel-Institut) dating back to the mid-20th century, covering economic and political issues of the Second Republic. Datasets are accessible through the AUSSDA Dataverse at data.aussda.at and are also included in the European CESSDA Data Catalogue and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Relevance to Media and Journalism Research

AUSSDA's holdings include survey data tracking Austrian public attitudes towards news events, political topics, and media consumption patterns, providing valuable longitudinal data for media scholars and journalists studying public opinion trends.

Access and Usage

Archiving and access to research data at AUSSDA is free of charge. Data is provided for secondary analysis under appropriate data use agreements. AUSSDA also offers consultations on research data management, data management plans, anonymization, metadata, DOI assignment, and data citation. The main office is located at Teinfaltstraße 8, 1010 Vienna.