Twenty Years Back, Five Years Forward: The Past, Present and Future of DANS

The first IDCC took place in 2005. In that same year, the Dutch national research funder and the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences created a new organization called DANS with a mission to preserve and guarantee continued access to research data in the humanities and social sciences. Twenty years later DANS has become the Dutch national centre of expertise and repository for research data, with a mission to enhance the reusability of research data and thus the quality of scientific research. And what will the future bring for DANS? We are currently working on our strategy for the coming years. In this presentation I will give a concise overview of the DANS organization and services as well as the main developments in its environment, in the past (2005), present (2025) and future (2030). This will show that the environment in which DANS is positioned changed dramatically over the last twenty years, with the rapid development of the digital world, the arrival of the Open Science and FAIR concepts and the unprecedented impact of AI. On the other hand we will see that a lot of the challenges that were identified in 2005 still exist.