B2SHARE Premium Service Description

Introduction

Purpose of this document

This document outlines the EUDAT B2SHARE Premium service, including its service level and the roles and responsibilities of the involved parties. The EUDAT B2SHARE Premium services are owned by the Customer organisation, and provided by a EUDAT Service Provider.

More information on the related EUDAT CDI B2SHARE service is available here: EUDAT CDI B2SHARE Service Description

Terminology and definitions

• Service: EUDAT B2SHARE Premium service as described by this document.
• End user: A natural person using the service described in this document. The end user can belong to Communities, and can be affiliated to Customer organisations.
  • Different end-user roles are described in the Community Agreement
• Customer: A legal entity, i.e., the customer organisation of a contract-based paid B2SHARE Premium service.
• Community:
  • A B2SHARE community means a research community with a common shared purpose or context in the scientific research process. A community can consist of a research infrastructure, a university or department, a research institute, or some other national or international research organization. The community has responsibilities as described in the B2SHARE Community Agreement.
• Service Provider: The organisation providing the service directly to a Customer, or on behalf of EUDAT Ltd.
• Record: Datasets are called records in B2SHARE - it is a published metadata entry, which can include data files, and is identified by a persistent identifier.
• Dataset: see Record

Service description

Purpose of the Service

B2SHARE is a user-friendly, reliable, and trustworthy way for researchers, scientific communities and citizen scientists to store, publish, and share research data in a FAIR way. B2SHARE is a solution that facilitates research data storage, guarantees long-term persistence of data and allows data, results or ideas to be shared worldwide. B2SHARE supports community domains with metadata extensions, access rules and publishing workflows.

B2SHARE is part of the broader EUDAT service offering and enables integrations with other services. It supports the FAIR principles, for example, by granting DOI identifiers, facilitating identity federation through B2ACCESS or national solutions such as Finnish Haka Federation, supporting data transfer from B2DROP services, improving metadata interoperability, and increasing visibility through B2FIND and OpenAIRE Explorer.

EUDAT B2SHARE Premium services are tailored to the needs of customer organizations and communities on a contract-by-contract basis, while EUDAT CDI B2SHARE is a free service open to all researchers and communities. Tailoring may include customization of metadata models, storage capacity, and access rights. Some tailoring of the free EUDAT CDI B2SHARE is possible in funded RDI project collaboration. More information on the EUDAT CDI B2SHARE service is available here: EUDAT CDI B2SHARE Service Description.

Intended users

B2SHARE serves several stakeholders:

• Researchers and other data producers for depositing, publishing and sharing their datasets, and indicating connections to other research outputs and the merit of their work
• Researchers discovering existing data for reuse, analysis, publication reference, and planning projects and collaboration
• Data managers and curators in research institutions, research infrastructures and other communities managing their collective data
• Research administration and funding decision makers for source of current research information, overviews and statistics

Service Features

The service documentation can be accessed at: https://docs.eudat.eu/b2share/overview/

The service provision includes technical infrastructure, data center services, B2SHARE application features, and human resources and processes required to provide the service. EUDAT B2SHARE Premium service includes a dedicated service instance for the customer, and several communities within the service can be created depending on customer needs for organisational, thematic, or other purposes.

• A stable and trustworthy solution
  • Data storage is provided by stable European service providers, and data stays within the European Economic Area (EEA).
  • Professionally managed storage service – no need to worry about hardware provisioning
  • A scalable solution: upload and registration of stable research data for researchers, within the capacity rules agreed with the Customer
  • Data owner defines access policy
  • Data is assigned a persistent identifier, which can be traced back to the data owner
  • Data integrity is ensured by a checksum during data ingestion
  • Monitoring of availability and usage
  • EUDAT user support
  • Based on the established InvenioRDM software
• Interoperability promotes discovery, reuse and long-term impact of your research outputs
  • Interoperable with many European research communities, repositories and data management standards.
  • Integrated with the EUDAT collaborative data infrastructure services
  • Openly accessible and harvestable metadata
  • Datasets published in B2SHARE are automatically discoverable through EUDAT B2FIND, enhancing their reuse potential. Premium service offers more opportunities for extending discovery and reuse.
• Data lifecycle management
  • Helps researchers and communities to follow FAIR principles of data management.
  • Community and researcher dashboards
  • Record metadata updates, versioning and management
  • Integrated license selector tool
  • Access request and granting workflows to limited-access datasets, including temporary access for external reviewers during publication embargo
  • Dataset view and download statistics
  • Cumulative statistics for communities
  • Publication review workflows to ensure conformance to community quality and policies
• Tailored solution - A contracted B2SHARE Premium service can be customized to include more features, such as:
  • Scalable capacity options based on customer needs
  • Community views for managing data through specific organisational and thematic catalogues. Access rules can be tailored to manage viewing, publishing and download rights.
  • Discovery and reuse can be further extended through, e.g., organisational, thematic community, national and international repositories and portal services, such as OpenAIRE explore and EOSC nodes.
  • Community-specific metadata schema extensions for richer metadata and interoperability with external services
  • Premium services can be tailored to harvest to and from other organisational, thematic or national repositories and current research information systems.
  • User and access management features and automation for Premium customer organisations, including other trust federations and organisational user management solutions and workflows.
  • Data ingestion automation and publication workflows with external data sources (such as EUDAT B2SAFE)
  • Customized look-and-feel to match your institution's visual identity
  • Integration with external services
  • Application programming interface (REST API), which communities and research can use for integration with external community services, applications and workflows
  • New custom-built functionalities and features

Service dependencies and integrations

EUDAT B2SHARE Services are dependent on the following external services. The list isn't exhaustive, and excludes internal service management-related tools and services. Premium services can also include other additional integrations, if so agreed.

• Authentication and Authorisation Infrastructure (AAI)
  • EUDAT B2ACCESS - federated cross-infrastructure authorisation and authentication proxy for user authentication and community-defined access control enforcement.
• Persistent Identifier (PID) assignment and resolution for datasets
  • EUDAT B2HANDLE - service for assigning, storing, managing and accessing persistent identifiers (ePIC handle) and essential metadata, and managing PID namespaces
  • DataCite DOI - consortium and services for assigning, storing, managing and accessing persistent identifiers (DOI) and essential metadata, and managing PID namespaces
  • Dataset metadata can include references to other external digital objects using various identifiers, such as ORCIDs for researchers, RORs for research organisations, etc.
• Dataset discovery and reuse
  • EUDAT B2FIND - an interdisciplinary discovery portal and metadata indexing service, which harvests dataset metadata from B2SHARE instances and other repositories
  • Premium services can be tailored to harvest to and from other repositories, such as Fairdata.fi, the Finnish National integrated services for storing, publishing and sharing research data.
  • Dataset metadata harvested by B2FIND and, e.g. Fairdata.fi, can further expose datasets to other national and international discovery services, such as OpenAIRE Explore and Research.fi
• Data ingestion and publication
  • EUDAT B2DROP - services for active data storage, sharing and synchronisation, which offers a bridge for ingesting data directly to B2SHARE services for publication
  • Premium services can be tailored to include other data sources (such as EUDAT B2SAFE) for more automated data ingestion and publication workflows.
• Documentation
  • Shared documentation platforms of EUDAT

 

Service Level Agreement (SLA) 

Service Availability

The services are available for 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. Availability target for the services is 97% or above. Availability is automatically measured by the Service Provider's monitoring system.

• Scheduled service breaks (announced at least 7 days prior) do not affect the availability target.
• Incident management-related downtimes do not lower service availability.
• Announced service upgrades and security patches do not lower service availability.

Service maintenance

Services have monthly service breaks; however, the times may vary:

• Each service break is planned and informed to customers beforehand, and the exact date and time may vary. Usually, the breaks are scheduled between 12:00 - 18:00 EE(S)T. The service break announcement will be published on Service Provider's regular notification channel as agreed in contract, such as https://research.csc.fi/service-break/ , at least one week before the planned service break.
• It should be noted that the length of the service break depends on the tasks at hand and can be shorter than 6 hours.
• If critical service maintenance measures must be carried out at other times, Service Provider shall endeavour to give at least two business days' notice prior to the maintenance break.

Service support

Service Provider is responsible for Service administration and support as agreed in contracts, such as 8:30 - 16:00 EE(S)T on business days (Mon-Fri), excluding Finnish public holidays.

Service support is provided as agreed in contract, such as 8:30 - 16:00 EE(S)T on business days (Mon-Fri), excluding Finnish  public holidays. Premium service support is negotiable, and Service Provider can offer technical expert support for customer contacts through a separate support channel. In Premium Services, end users are recommended to use their home organisation's designated support channel primarily to ensure conformance to organisational data policies and organisation's data support awareness of potential issues. The response and resolution times are defined in the SLA section above. 

Service request response and resolution times follow the guidelines of EUDAT OLA.

• Response Time calculation starts from the moment the ticket arrives in the support queue (during business hours) and ends when the ticket has been responded to.
• Resolution Time calculation starts from the moment the ticket arrives in the support queue (during business hours) and ends when the request has been resolved, or in case of an incident, when a workaround has been applied.

 

Incident management

EUDAT B2SHARE Premium services follow Service Provider, e.g. CSC, general incident management guidelines for incident identification and classification, communication and escalation, reporting, and resolution and recovery procedures. Resolution times are as described in the table below, unless otherwise agreed in contract.

Quality reporting

Premium service offers quarterly quality reports, which are reviewed together with the Customer. Reports include information on service usage, SLA performance, customer support, and service development status.

The process and content of Premium service quality tracking and reporting may be adjusted based on mutual agreement between the Service Provider and the Customer.

Service management and development

Service Provider shall decide on the development of the Service, taking into account the views expressed by the Customer and other customer organisations. Service Provider shall keep the Customer informed of plans relating to the maintenance and development of the Service at regular liaison meetings.

The Customer may propose changes to the Service. The implementation of changes and any associated cost implications shall be agreed separately.

Service responsibilities

Responsibilities and rights of Service Provider, Customer, Users and User Communities are in EUDAT B2SHARE Premium Terms of Use.

Further information

• Privacy Policy: https://csc-eudat.pages.eudat.eu/privacy-policy/
• CSC Security Policy https://research.csc.fi/security/
• CSC Terms of Use https://research.csc.fi/terms-of-use/
• EUDAT CDI Acceptable Use Policy and Conditions of Use: https://eudat.eu/eudat-cdi-aup
• EUDAT Services Terms of Use

 

This document was last modified on: 10.12.2025
This document was last reviewed on: 10.12.2025