In a joint document, major German research alliances emphasize the importance of research data and software for their research processes. In the declaration, which was published in the journal "Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement" on March 14, 2022, the participating alliances commit themselves, among other things, to support their researchers as an alliance in handling data and software according to the FAIR principles in agreement with the "Guidelines for Safeguarding Good Research Practice" of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and to use and provide adequate research data management tools and services for this purpose.
Prof. Bernd Flemisch, member of the committee "Data and Software Management" in SimTech, is pleased that spokespersons of 20 Clusters of Excellence and 6 Collaborative Research Centers have signed the commitment: "This is a great success and, in my opinion, clearly positions these research alliances in the very dynamically developing FDM landscape."
The foundation for the joint document was laid during the virtual strategy workshop "Data and Software Management in Large Research Collaborations" in April 2021, which was organized by the two Clusters of Excellence SimTech and IntCDC at the University of Stuttgart. During the workshop, the idea of the commitment and a first text proposal were presented and interated. The workshop participants drafted the final text and clarified the purpose of the commitment:
- Especially in the Cluster of Excellence applications, research data management (FDM) is part of the very broad management section and thus varies greatly across the applications. By making this commitment, the signatory alliances are sending a signal that they recognize the importance of this topic and that they are taking measures to address this importance.
- In many cases, the alliances have already built up a high level of competence in this area. The commitment shows that the alliances will contribute this competence and can and want to actively shape the future of RDM together with explicit RDM initiatives such as the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) or the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
- In a current impulse paper of the DFG with recommendations for the recently started legislative period of the Bundestag, the topic is given high priority with the impulse "Designing research data management to be sustainable in the long term". The DFG funding program "Information Infrastructures for Research Data" was also recently updated. Through their commitment, the consortia signal that they support these current developments and can act as research nuclei for more far-reaching initiatives.
"We thank all workshop participants for their active engagement in discussing and improving the text and for passing on the idea to the spokespersons of the research alliances," Flemisch emphasizes.
Competence Center for Research Data Management at the University of Stuttgart