First insights from the Research Data Management Survey 2025
©CC-BY-NC-SA EPFL Library
For this year’s Love Data Week, the Research Data Management (RDM) team of the EPFL Library warmly thanks all 2’107 participants (including 163 EPFL members) who took part in the 2025 edition of the survey dedicated to research data management. Conducted since 2017, this biennial survey has now reached a national scale, bringing together 14 Swiss universities and research institutions committed to a shared effort to better understand, support, and further develop research data and code management practices.
On average, each respondent devoted 11 minutes to sharing their practices: a valuable investment that helps strengthen services and competencies in research data and code management.
Before the publication of a full report, here is an overview of the EPFL-specific results.
Audiences and priority needs:
- Among respondents, postdocs are the most represented group (30%), followed closely by Bachelor/Master students (27%) and PhD researchers (23%).
- Half of the respondents spend up to one day per week on data management, one third spend two to three days, and a quarter four to five days.
- The most frequently cited RDM priorities concern data storage and backup (34%), metadata standards (29%), licensing and copyright (28%), dataset documentation (28%), and data management plans (26%).
Some warning signs to monitor
- Nearly 46% of participants report not fully understanding the licenses they use, and 11% say they do not know what a license is.
- Nearly 44% report not knowing metadata standards.
- 20% do not intentionally perform any versioning of their data or code.
Storage and sharing:
- Institutional storage solutions remain the most used (67%), slightly ahead of code-sharing platforms (64%).
- However, only 72% of those who use a code-sharing platform also use institutional storage, highlighting an important point for security
Many thanks once again to everyone who took the time to respond! The consolidated feedback will help refine services, training, and tools to better support data and code management at EPFL and across Switzerland.
For any questions, visit go.epfl.ch/rdm or contact [email protected]