Collaborations

NEAR has various national and international collaborations with other infrastructures and consortium. Below is a list of these major collaborators with NEAR.

In Sweden. Two major national infrastructures: SHARE-Sweden (Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement) and SIMPLER (Swedish Infrastructure for Medical Population-based Life-course and Environmental Research) are collaborators to NEAR. SIMPLER is led by a consortium including Uppsala University, Karolinska Institutet, Chalmers University of Technology and Örebro University in collaboration with the Regions of Uppsala, Västmanland and Örebro. SHARE is the largest pan-European social science panel study and is centrally coordinated by the Munich Center for the Economics of Aging (MEA), Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy. A collaboration has also been established with the Swedish Twin Register (STR), as four databases included in NEAR were initially derived from the STR.

Outside Sweden. All local databases in NEAR already have long-standing collaborations with international consortium. Some examples are:  

• ELAPSE, Effects of Low-level Air Pollution: a Study in Europe, financed by The Health Effects Institute, Boston
• ENIGMA, Enhancing NeuroImaging Genetics through Meta-Analysis, involving countries from all continents
• IGEMS, Consortium on Interplay of Genes and Environment across Multiple Studies, which includes the Nordic twin registries
• IALSA, Integrative Analysis of Longitudinal Studies of Aging, aimed to evaluate the reproducibility of results from longitudinal studies
• SAGE, WHO Study on global AGEing & health

External support
Below is a list of external infrastructures that already support or plan to support NEAR in the future.

Maelstrom Research

NEAR primarily uses the open-source software’s Opal and MICA developed by Maelstrom Research, which provides the foundation for the interactive e-codebook. NEAR consults Maelstrom Research for documenting and cataloguing metadata, as well as for the harmonization processes. Maelstrom Research also provides IT-support for software development & updates, and analysis solutions.

The Swedish National Database Service (SND)

NEAR and SND have an ongoing collaboration with fruitful discussions on metadata dissemination and developmental plans for future directions. NEAR metadata is available at SND (in DORIS). SND is an important part in the development of data
documentation on a national level and NEAR is a member of the SND network.

Swedish University Computer Network (SUNET)

SUNET is an infrastructure that fulfills IT service requirements at Swedish universities. SUNET provides IT-solutions to secure data transfers between the local databases and the NEAR Central, as well as the NEAR central and users. NEAR and SUNET have an ongoing discussion on the further development of the online meta-data platform. 

Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC)

SNIC is a national research infrastructure that facilitates large-scale, high-performance computing resources and storage capacity, as well as advanced user support. NEAR OG has an ongoing discussion with SNIC-SENS (provides resources for secure handling of sensitive data) to
formalize regular support guidelines for data management and analysis.

The Register Utilizer Tool (RUT)

NEAR has an ongoing discussion with RUT to make the NEAR-metadata available. This could facilitate an easier connection with registers for NEAR data.