Data Without Boundaries

Data without Boundaries, DwB, project aims to an integrated model for accessing official data, a model where the best solutions for access are available irrespective of national boundaries and flexible enough to fit national arrangements.

In order to succeed, the project needs to prepare the essential relationships and build trust, common view and agreements on standards between the European Statistical System led by Eurostat, other stakeholders as the Central banks, the Data Archives European network (CESSDA) and the researchers who are the final users.

In the prevailing situation, access to anonymised official microdata for research is still uneven both at national and at European level, and yet at the same time, access to highly detailed and sensitive microdata is increasingly on the agenda. Different member states have substantially different outcomes for research access to official data. The issue is not just efficiency, but real harm to the contribution of the social sciences to democracy in an information society.

DwB partners aim at

• discussing frameworks and proposing pilots for a European accreditation and a distributed remote access for confidential microdata to be expanded later to other partners, both for national and European datasets
• fostering discussions and promoting improvements and solutions for the entire communities through European data Forum, regional workshops, users conferences, training sessions, staff visits
• preparing an easy and single point of access for the researchers, to be linked to the CESSDA portal where NSIs metadata could be harvested when not available through the CESSDA archives
• immediately enhancing access to official data making European datasets more useable and supporting foreign researchers transnational access both on site and through a remote access system to countries’ official microdata.

Close coordination with the European Statistical System discussions and initiatives as well as with on-going and future related projects is developed to ensure maximum synergy and incorporation of outputs.

There are 27 partners from 12 European countries participating the efforts, both statistical offices and data archives. DwB project is funded by the European Commission's 7th Framework Programme.