ZBW experience with the building of infrastructures

The ZBW Journal Data Archive is a service for editors of journals in economics and management. The aim of this web service is to offer scholarly journals an easy to handle infrastructure for managing and storing data sets of published articles and to link the data sets to their corresponding publication. The service is free of charge for academic journals.

“GeRDI – Generic Research Data Infrastructure” was a project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) which aimed to build a federated and linked-up infrastructure for research data (scientific cloud) where scientists could conduct multidisciplinary searches for research data.

KOLab was a joint lab based on the Leibniz Association’s position paper for the Pact for Research and Innovation. The ZBW and the University of Kiel jointly researched and developed systems and processes for the optimal handling of research data and their corresponding software.

The project aimed to build a web-based infrastructure for research data in economics and the social sciences — enabling self-archiving, documentation and distribution of research data.

The research project EDaWaX was funded from 2011 until 2016 by the DFG. It dealt with the management of research data in economics journals.

Today, many contributions in scholarly journals are based on the analysis of research data and statistics. But the results of such analyses postulated in a journal article cannot be replicated or examined without the research data and the code of computation (syntax) of the statistical analysis used.

Therefore EDaWaX advised editors of economics journals in matters of appropriate policies aiming to involve research data in the review- and publication process. In addition, EDaWaX developed software which makes the management of such research data easier for the editors of scholarly journals.

In addition, the project intensively explored the question how suitable incentives to promote data sharing within the scientific community should be designed.

The ZBW also processed historical statistics for research data management within the project “Digitale Reichsstatistik”, which was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Statistical material which until then had only been available in print was digitised and converted into formats readable with spreadsheet and statistical software.

The data were derived from the “Statistics of the German Reich (1873-1883)”, which represent the foundation of official German statistics. They provided, for the first time, data collected according to uniform criteria across all of Germany within its borders at that time.