Cooperative Research Data Management

“Data are the core of every research”, said Schleswig-Holstein education minister Karin Prien when an association of 14 tertionary education and research institutions presented their concept for a state intitiative for research data management on 31 March. The open and cooperative concept is intended to form the basis for sustainable handling of research data in Schleswig-Holstein.

“A culture of open data”, as minister Prien framed her ideal, is not easy to attain. Not for lack of good intentions, but because of limited resources. By no means all research institutions have staff who specialise in data management, as Frank Schwartze, vice-president for research and international affairs at TH Lübeck, pointed out.

The research landscape in Schleswig-Holstein is going to meet this challenge together and has developed in a mere five months, under the leadership of Kiel University, a concept for cooperative research data management. The state initiative will become the central starting point for the research institutions, research funders and the state government in all issues regarding research data management.

The concept follows the experience of other state initiatives already established, and the developments and results of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). After all, 26 NFDI consortia, aligned along disciplinary focuses, are already working on the basics to make research data available, to link them and to make them usable in the long-term.

The importance of research data management was pointed out by Professor Klaus Tochtermann, director of the ZBW – Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and representative of the alliance for Top Research-SH: “Without data, there is no Artificial Intelligence.” Proximity to the research landscape in the region is also a necessity, as he stressed the importance of a strategy embedded in the region.