Research data management - FAQ

Regardless of where the data is stored and regardless of the storage service, any data created or modified during your collaboration with UNIL is protected by copyright but belongs to UNIL. This means that for any use other than scientific and academic purposes, a special agreement of UNIL's Management is required (e.g. for commercialization).

Based on UNIL’s rugulations (Art. 70-72 LUL), we would like to clarify a few practical points related to data::

If in doubt, please contact UNIL's Legal Department. 

UNIL encourages employees to save all work-related data generated during their collaboration with UNIL on the University's institutional infrastructure (Directive 4.5 Art. 8 al. 2). To this end, the UNIL Central IT Services (Ci) provides a NAS storage server.

The UNIL Isilon NAS server is a secure and robust storage service that guarantees the security and durability of your work data. This network storage server is available to all collaborator under contract with UNIL and offers a high level of availability. It is divided into two separate tree structures – research and administrative – which allow data to be organized according to its nature.

Since June 2019, the UNIL IT Center has strengthened its services dedicated to research at the University by creating the Scientific Computing and Research Support Unit (DCSR). This unit is responsible for advising researchers and providing them with new infrastructure for storing and processing research data.

The DCSR NAS server (nasdcsr.unil.ch\RECHERCHE) is dedicated to storing research data organized by project for each Principal Investigator (PI). HPC infrastructure enables researchers to perform scientific computing.

To benefit from these resources, PIs must complete the DCSR application form and submit a Data Management Plan (DMP) when requesting storage space for a research project.

These services are subject to a fee and their use is billed to PIs according to the annual price list (authenticated UNIL access) established by the UNIL IT Center.

The use of cloud services must comply with UNIL's legal requirements. Furthermore, any use of these services is the sole responsibility of the user, who assumes full responsibility for the risks involved, knowing that no assistance is offered on our part.

The University authorizes the use of third-party storage services provided that the data is stored in Switzerland (Directive 6.9, Art. 5). If the data is stored abroad, it must be encrypted and the encryption key must be stored in Switzerland.

For cloud storage, UNIL has opted for Microsoft's OneDrive solution. However, this storage service can only host professional administrative data. The use of OneDrive to store research data is prohibited.

We also draw your attention to the fact that the use of cloud services may involve risks for your data:

• The provider may modify its service at any time (service termination, price changes, etc.).
• In the event of data loss, no assistance will be provided by the FBM IT Department.
• The data may be read and used by third parties (foreign legislation is often more flexible in terms of data protection).