This survey investigates Research Data Management (RDM) practices across five Swiss higher education institutions, including EPFL, ETH Zürich, Eawag, FHNW, and DaSCH, with the goal of gathering insights into how researchers manage data and code throughout the lifecycle of their projects, as well as using such findings to inform academic services related to RDM for researchers. Previous surveys, conducted at EPFL in 2017, 2019, and 2021, primarily focused on the planning and publishing stages of the research data lifecycle, such as data management planning and open data dissemination. The 2023 edition expanded to other institutes and places a stronger emphasis on Active Data Management, particularly during research projects, including a range of topics such as:

Storage and backup solutions

Data and code sharing platforms

Documentation and metadata usage

Compliance with legal and ethical standards

Long-term data preservation strategies

Use of open formats and open-source software

Adoption of Data Management Plans (DMPs)

This dataset was collected using the SurveyHero platform in compliance with GDPR and Swiss FADP regulations. enuvo GmbH acted as the data processor under a signed Data Processing Agreement. No personal identifiable information was purposefully collected, and data has been aggregated to further ensure respondents’ privacy.

Included in this dataset:

A CSV and XLSX file with the aggregated, anonymized data from the survey.

Two PDF files containing graphical representations of the survey results, automatically generated by the SurveyHero platform in portrait and landscape mode.

A README file providing context.

This dataset is made openly available under the CC-BY 4.0 license. Users are encouraged to reuse it with appropriate attribution.