The University improves its digital facilities dedicated to research
Since the concept of open science was integrated into national strategies around ten years ago, digital infrastructures dedicated to research data have become increasingly important. Researchers are encouraged, even obliged, to submit their work on platforms in order to share it and make it sustainable. Swissuniversities and the SNSF adopted a national strategy for open access in 2017, which was revised in 2024. The national university authorities also published a Strategy on open research data in 2021. In order to encourage these approaches, the SNSF can provide funding for deposit activities.
Through digital technology, scientists also benefit from computing power which is revolutionizing the way research is carried out, both in the human and social sciences and in the natural sciences.
At UNIGE, the “Digital Infrastructures and Services for Research” program has been offering several new features since this academic year. By relying on digital humanities standards for sharing visual resources, the hedera service now facilitates the analysis of semantic data, their interoperability and sharing as well as their possible processing by AI. Archaeologists from the University have deposited a set of more than 8,700 slides of archaeological objects which testify to the important sociological evolution that human beings underwent between the Neolithic and Antiquity. One of the advantages of hedera is that it allows the visualization and management of images via the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) protocol which adapts to a wide variety of formats. Art historians also use it to study phenomena linked to the globalization of images.
Hedera is also connected to the Yareta platform. Recognized by the FNS and used for several years at UNIGE for the deposit and sharing of data, the latter has recently been enriched with new functionalities. Scientists can notably declare the degree of sensitivity of their data as well as access conditions relating to contractual obligations. Created at the initiative of the State of Geneva, Yareta recently obtained international Core Trust Seal certification.
The interface of the UNIGE Open Archive, on which researchers submit their scientific articles and thesis work in order to disseminate them as widely as possible, has been completely revised. Each author now has a personalized dashboard listing all their publications as well as consultation and download statistics. ORCID identifiers, which make it possible to universally identify the authors of academic contributions, are also integrated into this institutional repository, born in the bosom of the open access movement. They offer the possibility of automatically completing the profile of researchers with their publications.
Finally, a new high-performance computing cluster called “Bamboo” was put into service at Campus Biotech. It is in addition to two existing installations of the same type, Baobab and Yggdrasil. Particularly suitable for 3D simulations, machine learning and generative AI, it meets the latest requirements in terms of energy consumption. For both environmental and economic reasons, its use will be chargeable beyond 100,000 hours of calculation, from January 2025. This practice is already common in most Swiss universities.
As the carbon footprint linked to the use of digital research infrastructures becomes a central concern, a plan to replace the University’s oldest servers has also been planned.
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