DANS: Netherlands' National Data Archive

DANS — Data Archiving and Networked Services — is the Netherlands’ national institute for permanent access to digital research data. It is a joint institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the Dutch Research Council (NWO), which positions it as part of the Dutch national research infrastructure rather than a single university’s library service or a commercial vendor. For Dutch researchers and the research offices that support them, DANS is typically the default answer to “where do I archive this dataset so it satisfies my funder’s data management plan commitments,” and understanding what it actually offers — and what changed inside it over the past several years — matters for anyone writing a DMP that names a Dutch repository.

What DANS Is, and Who Runs It

DANS describes its mission as enhancing the reusability of research data, and by extension the quality of the research built on it. As a joint KNAW/NWO institute, it sits at the intersection of two roles that are often split across separate bodies in other countries: KNAW is the Netherlands’ academy of sciences and humanities, while NWO is the country’s main public research funder. That dual parentage is part of why DANS functions simultaneously as a national archive, a funder-adjacent policy voice on research data management, and a training and consultancy body for institutions building out their own RDM support.

From EASY to Domain-Specific Data Stations

For a long time, DANS’s primary public-facing service was EASY (Electronic Archiving SYstem), a single online long-term archiving system launched in 2005 and used mostly for self-archiving in the humanities, social and behavioural sciences, health sciences, oral history, and spatial sciences. Under its 2021–2025 strategy, DANS restructured this into discipline-specific Data Stations, all built on Dataverse repository software, covering four domains:

Social Sciences and Humanities
Archaeology
Life Sciences
Physical and Technical Sciences

Each Data Station presents discipline-appropriate metadata fields, review workflows, and guidance, while all of them deposit into the same underlying long-term preservation layer, which DANS calls its Data Vault. If you encounter older documentation, funder guidance, or a DMP template that still refers to depositing “in EASY,” treat that as referring to what is now organized as the Data Stations — the underlying long-term-preservation commitment is the same, but the deposit interface and discipline-specific structure have changed.

DataverseNL: A Shared Service for Institutions

Separately from the Data Stations, DANS also operates DataverseNL, launched in 2013, which gives Dutch universities and research organizations their own branded space (a “dataverse”) within a shared, DANS-hosted instance of the open-source Dataverse platform. This is aimed less at the individual researcher choosing where to publish a finished dataset, and more at an institution that wants a managed, locally-branded repository for its researchers’ active and near-term data without building and hosting that infrastructure itself. Institutions considering this kind of shared-service model may also find it useful to compare Dryad vs. Dataverse and Dataverse vs. Figshare for how the underlying platform choice plays out elsewhere.

Trustworthiness: CoreTrustSeal Certification

DANS’s repository infrastructure (EASY, and now the Data Stations built on the same Data Vault) has held CoreTrustSeal certification, the internationally recognized core-level trustworthy-data-repository standard. For a research administrator evaluating whether naming DANS in a DMP will satisfy a funder’s repository-quality expectations, this certification is the concrete evidence to point to: it means the repository has been externally assessed against CoreTrustSeal’s requirements covering organizational infrastructure, digital object management, and technology, rather than simply asserting trustworthiness. See CASRAI’s guide to CoreTrustSeal certification for what the assessment actually checks and how repositories maintain it over time.

How DANS Supports Data Management Plans and Funder Compliance

Dutch researchers encounter DMP requirements from several directions at once: NWO’s own RDM policy expects funded researchers to plan for the storage, sharing, and long-term preservation of research data; Horizon Europe’s Model Grant Agreement imposes its own FAIR-data DMP obligations on any Dutch participant in an EU-funded consortium (see CASRAI’s Horizon Europe FAIR Data Management Plan guide); and individual Dutch universities layer their own institutional RDM policies on top of both. DANS’s role in this landscape is less about writing the plan itself and more about being the trustworthy endpoint the plan can credibly name, plus the training and consultancy that helps a researcher or data steward get from “we have a repository” to “our data actually satisfies FAIR.” DANS runs workshops and practical guidance sessions for researchers and institutional data professionals, and staff are a recognized point of consultation for Dutch institutions building out their own RDM support offices — this is consultancy and training capacity, not a substitute for reading the specific DMP requirements of the funder a given grant is awarded under.

Who Can Use DANS, and What It Costs

DANS’s Data Stations and EASY-successor infrastructure are oriented toward researchers affiliated with Dutch research institutions and toward data with a genuine connection to the Netherlands’ research base, though exact eligibility, any deposit fees, and file-size or format restrictions vary by Data Station and are set out on each Data Station’s own submission guidelines rather than in a single uniform policy. Because these details (fees, size limits, accepted formats) are the kind of operational specifics that change without much notice, a research office advising a specific researcher should confirm current terms directly on the relevant Data Station’s page at dans.knaw.nl rather than relying on a general description like this one.

Choosing the Right Data Station

In practice, the first decision a Dutch researcher writing a DMP needs to make is which of the four Data Stations fits their data — this is largely determined by discipline (a genomics dataset belongs in Life Sciences, an excavation dataset in Archaeology, a survey dataset in Social Sciences and Humanities) rather than by researcher preference, since each station’s metadata schema and review process are built around what that community’s data typically looks like. Where a project genuinely spans domains, or where the data is more naturally suited to an international domain repository (for example, genomic sequence data belongs in an international nucleotide archive rather than a national generalist one), DANS is not automatically the right home for every dataset a Dutch-funded project produces — it is the default national option, not the only permissible one under most funder mandates, which typically require a “trustworthy” or “FAIR-compliant” repository rather than a specific named one.

Data Privacy and Sensitive Data

As an EU-based repository, DANS operates under the GDPR framework, and its Data Stations support restricted- and controlled-access deposit options alongside fully open ones — relevant for researchers whose data cannot be openly shared for privacy, ethical, or third-party-agreement reasons. As with the eligibility and cost details above, the specific access-tier options and any data-sharing-agreement requirements are set at the level of the individual Data Station and dataset, not as a single blanket DANS-wide policy, so this needs confirming for the specific dataset in question rather than assumed from general description.

What Happened to NARCIS

Older RDM guidance sometimes references NARCIS, DANS’s former national portal aggregating Dutch research output (publications, datasets, and project metadata) since 2004. NARCIS was discontinued on 3 July 2023 and replaced by the Netherlands Research Portal, built on OpenAIRE, through a collaboration between UKB, SURF, and OpenAIRE. The underlying metadata that NARCIS used to aggregate remains available in the originating institutional and disciplinary repositories (including DANS’s own Data Stations) — only the single aggregating portal changed. Anyone following a DMP template or institutional guidance document that still points researchers to NARCIS should treat that as outdated and redirect to the current Netherlands Research Portal instead.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is DANS the same organization as KNAW or NWO?

No. DANS is a joint institute of both — it is legally and operationally part of the Dutch national research infrastructure, but it is a distinct institute with its own repository services, not a department inside either parent organization’s general operations.

Do I still deposit data “in EASY”?

EASY as a single unified system has been superseded by the four discipline-specific Data Stations, all built on Dataverse software and backed by the same Data Vault preservation layer. Guidance that references EASY by name is describing what is now organized as the Data Stations.

Does naming DANS in a Horizon Europe DMP satisfy the FAIR-data requirement automatically?

Naming a CoreTrustSeal-certified repository is strong supporting evidence for a FAIR-compliant DMP, but it does not by itself satisfy the requirement — Horizon Europe’s Model Grant Agreement evaluates the plan as a whole, including metadata, licensing, and access conditions, not just repository choice. See CASRAI’s Horizon Europe FAIR DMP guide for the full requirement.

Can non-Dutch researchers deposit data with DANS?

DANS’s services are oriented toward data connected to Dutch research institutions; researchers outside that scope should check the specific eligibility terms of the relevant Data Station rather than assume access, since this is not uniformly documented as a single blanket policy.

Is DataverseNL the same as the Data Stations?

No — they are separate, if related, services. DataverseNL is a shared institutional Dataverse instance primarily used by organizations wanting their own branded repository space; the Data Stations are DANS’s own discipline-organized long-term archiving services. Both run on Dataverse software, but they serve different use cases.

DANS: The Netherlands’ National Research Data Archive and DMP Support