Science policy

As a Leibniz institution and foundation under public law it is a matter of concern for the ZBW to incorporate its own experiences and research results into the recommendations for policy and society.

The ZBW strives to provide expert/scientific contributions, to support policy decision-makers and to engage in a professional discourse, be it with open access strategies at national level, with the identification of indicators for the digitisation of science at federal level or with the establishment of research infrastructures at European level. The ZBW has established itself as a competent advisor for policy decision-makers at the international, national and regional level.

The ZBW actively collaborates in the committees and working groups in the context of research data named below.

The director of the ZBW, Prof Dr Klaus Tochtermann, was accepted as a member of the Scientific Senate of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) in October 2022. The Scientific Senate is the body of the NFDI Association that is responsible for the overall strategic direction of the NFDI Association, taking into account the impact on the scientific system.

The Council for Scientific Information Infrastructures (RfII) is an advisory body for science policy which advises the Federal and State governments in questions of the further development of scientific information infrastructures. The National Research Data Infrastructure has been initiated by the RfII. It has also developed important impulses for data quality and skills development in research data management. The director of the ZBW, Professor Klaus Tochtermann has been a member of the Council since its foundation until 2022 and headed various working groups.

Within the initiative “Digital Information” of the Alliance of Science Organisations, the ZBW is a member of the Working group “Federated IT Infrastructure” which analyses the research data infrastructures NFDI and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).The working group was one of the first actors to point out that NFDI and EOSC must be closely coordinated with the initiative GAIA-X, a large business data project, to leverage synergies between science and business.

The director of the ZBW, Professor Klaus Tochtermann, had been elected as the new president of the European Open Science Cloud Association (EOSC-A) on 27 May 2025 and has lead the Association since 1 July 2025. The European Open Science Cloud is the central European research data infrastructure for science, supported by one billion euros in funding. As President, Klaus Tochtermann will represent the voice of the scientific community in future negotiation processes and will play a key role in shaping the future development of EOSC. Since 2020, Klaus Tochtermann has been a member of the eight-person Board of Directors of the European Open Science Cloud Association. Hence, the German science community has had a long-standing representative of the Open Science movement at the forefront of European science policy.