bwFDM goes Potsdam

A view on the Helmholtz Association's Data Infrastructures - How Harmonized is our Data?

The interconnectivity of existing data infrastructures (DIS) across national and international initiatives (e.g. NFDI, EOSC and others) is an important goal to create a common interoperable data space. To achieve this, it is critical to harmonize the existing methods and concepts of research data collection among the DIS and along the FAIR principles.Our vision is, to create a “Helmholtz data space”, unifying Earth and Environmental Centres and infrastructures and powering a new wave of large-scale, globally oriented, data driven research.The Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration’s (HMC) mission is, to federate (meta)data systems across Earth and Environment Centres and infrastructures throughout the Helmholtz Association, continuously aligning Helmholtz capacities to global norms and developments.Within the Helmholtz Association we maintain more than 50 active data infrastructures in the field of Earth and Environment. Procedures of data handling, documentation and storage are hardly coordinated within Helmholtz, even less so within the larger community. To find out about the state of our infrastructures, the different approaches in data management procedures, technical capabilities, and concepts, we conducted a survey among all Helmholtz DIS. We approached 55 Helmholtz DIS and received 37 complete answers.The questions asked were related to their roles in the community, self-perception, quality control, curation, technology interfaces, data re-use and demands.

Coordinating Research Data Management Activities on the State Level. The Example of Baden-Württemberg

Since 2014, the Ministry for Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg (MWK) has funded state-wide projects to coordinate research data management (RDM) activities, which illustrates these initiatives’ strategic importance for the MWK. Beyond that, the fact that the initiatives form part of conceptual frameworks such as bwDATA III or that bwFDM collaborates with projects like bwHPC-S5 underlines their RDM-related momentum. In this poster, we would like to present the internal organisational structure of bwFDM, the current federal state initiative for research data management in Baden-Württemberg. Furthermore, we want to describe bwFDM’s operational and strategic connections with other RDM actors and stakeholders in Baden-Württemberg and beyond. bwFDM is organised at three universities, where it is either associated with the university library (KIT-BIB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology), the university computing centre (URZ, University of Heidelberg), or a combination of the two called Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM, University of Konstanz). The KIT-BIB and the KIM share the project’s lead as well as its coordination. Additionally, all partner institutions have their own project staff and RDM experts, that partake in the operational and strategic decision-making process. Our two current flagship activities are the E-Science-Tage, a biannual RDM conference held in Heidelberg since 2017, and forschungdaten.info, the central German-language RDM information platform. Both have a significant impact on the national and international RDM landscape. As bwFDM, our range of activities involves Baden-Württemberg’s entire academic community. Along these lines and to include the entire state’s RDM expertise, we work with several different committees, the most established one being the Arbeitskreis Forschungsdatenmanagement. This working group involves RDM experts from the nine universities in Baden-Württemberg to, among other things, advise the AG BibDir (directors of university libraries) and the ALWR (directors of university computing centres) on RDM-related matters. This year, bwFDM will organise a networking and exchange event to strengthen the involvement of higher education institutions other than universities and to thereby enhance networking among different types of institutions. As federal state initiatives, such as bwFDM, are at the interface of different levels in Germany’s research data infrastructure, we communicate needs and developments from the local to the national level and vice versa. In this context, we work in close collaboration with other (federal state) RDM initiatives.

Facilitating the development of a diverse service landscape – Tasks and roles of Section Liaison Officers and Service Stewards within Base4NFDI

A group of innovative facilitators has started to support development of overarching services for research data management (RDM) in Germany. As part of Base4NFDI, Service Stewards and Section Liaison Officers support the integration of a hitherto rather diverse service landscape. Since March 2023, the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), comprises the final 26 discipline-specific consortia. They cover a broad range of scientific disciplines, spanning all subject areas from the humanities and social sciences, to the engineering sciences and the life and natural sciences. The consortia are developing new or enhancing existing tools, services, and workflows to enable FAIR data sharing in their respective disciplines. They are also driving cultural change towards an open data culture. This will professionalize RDM in a very diverse landscape of technical and organizational solutions. To support the development of missing links within an overarching NFDI portfolio, a joint initiative by all 26 NFDI consortia, Base4NFDI, supports the development of needed NFDI services, through a proposal-driven bottom-up process. These proposals are driven by the working groups within the NFDI Sections, where cross-cutting topics are addressed across the disciplinary boundaries of the consortia. The Section Liaison Officers directly support the work of the Sections in matters directly related to preparing basic services development strategies, decisions and monitoring. Their central tasks include assistance with coordinating discussions on similar topics across Sections and monitoring needs for complementary activities and collaboration between working groups. But they also collect feedback from all stakeholders to further consolidate and continuously update the process model for basic service development based on NFDI and community requirements. Additionally, a group of Service Stewards will ensure a smooth interplay between the sections, participating consortia and partner organizations involved in the development of a service. They scout the infrastructure landscape across NFDI consortia with regard to potential service candidates and survey requirements of the researchers in the different domains. They support the rollout of services and the integration into the existing infrastructure landscapes of the consortia. They are critical to efficient adaptation of basic-services as the consortia will often need additional support for integrating a basic service with their existing service portfolio or do not have the resources and or expertise for adopting a new service. Section Liaison Officers and Service Stewards work hand-in-hand to support consortia and sections within NFDI to foster the process of a basic service landscape created by a diverse scientific community from bottom-up.

Disappearing repositories - Taking an infrastructure perspective on the long-term availability of research data

In diesem Vortrag werden die Ergebnisse einer Untersuchung vorgestellt, die sich mit der Schließung von Forschungsdatenrepositorien befasst.Über das Verzeichnis re3data wurden 191 geschlossene Repositorien aller Disziplinen und Typen ermittelt. Informationen zum Schließungsprozess wurden durch die Auswertung von Webseiten der Repositorien und weiteren Materialien gesammelt.Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass 6,2 % der in re3data verzeichneten Repositorien geschlossen sind. Der Altersmedian der geschlossenen Repositorien liegt bei 12 Jahren. Vielfältige Risiken führen zur Schließung von Repositorien. Strategien zur Vermeidung von Datenverlust auf der Infrastrukturebene werden in unterschiedlichem Umfang verfolgt:44 % haben ihre Datenbestände vor der Schließung migriert, 12 % erhalte auch nach der Schließung einen begrenzten Zugang aufrecht.Der Vortrag schließt mit einer Diskussion möglicher Auswirkungen auf die Permanenz und Zitierfähigkeit von Forschungsdaten.

Do disappearing data repositories pose a threat to open science and the scholarly record?

Research data repositories play a vital role in ensuring research is reproducible, replicable and reusable. Yet, the infrastructure supporting them can be impermanent. Drawing on a new dataset Doro…

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RDA Deutschland Tagung 2024

Die RDA Deutschland Tagung 2024 wird vom RDA Deutschland e.V. in Kooperation mit dem Helmholtz Open Science Office und der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen veranstaltet. Sie findet vom 20. bis 21. Februar 2024 am Helmholtz-Zentrum Potsdam - Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum GFZ (Haus H) statt. Die Teilnahmegebühr beträgt 220 Euro (170 Euro für Frühbucher bis 12.01.24; eine begrenzte Anzahl von Ticket für Studierende für jeweils 60 Euro - zu buchen bis 12.01.24). Die Anmeldung für die Tagung...