“Data is at the heart of all research,” emphasized Minister of Education Karin Prien when, on March 31, a network of 14 Schleswig-Holstein universities and research institutions presented a concept for a Schleswig-Holstein state initiative on research data management. Open and based on partnership, this concept should form the basis for the sustainable handling of research data in Schleswig-Holstein.
A “culture of open data”, as Minister Prien would like it to be, is sometimes not that easy to achieve. And not because of a lack of good will, but because of limited resources. By no means all research institutions, she emphasized Professor Frank Schwartze, Vice President for Research and International Affairs at the Technical University of Lübeckhave staff specialized in data management.
The Schleswig-Holstein research landscape is now meeting this challenge together and has developed the concept for collaborative research data management within just five months under the leadership of the University of Kiel. The state initiative becomes the central contact point for research institutions and research sponsors as well as for the state of Schleswig-Holstein on the subject of research data management.
“The wheel does not have to be reinvented over and over again,” says Thilo Paul-Stüve, coordinator of central research data management at Kiel University and head of the FDM-SH project. Therefore, the concept is based on the experiences of already established state initiatives on research data management as well as the developments and results of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). After all, according to Dr. Holger Marten, the head of the University of Kiel’s computer center, has already laid the foundations for 26 NFDI consortia in Germany, which are geared towards specialist areas, in order to make research data available, network them and make them usable in the long term.
How important the topic of research data management is, was emphasized by Professor Klaus Hügelmann, director of the Leibniz Information Center for Economics in Kiel and representative of the Alliance for Top Research.SH: “Without data there is no artificial intelligence”. The proximity to the research landscape in the region is also necessary, he also referred to the importance of a strategy located in the state. Sören Lorenz, Chief Information Officer at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean Research Kiel, takes a similar view. “Research data management thrives on exchange,” he emphasized and was pleased that the current concept provided a “missing component”. As “really impressive” described Dr. Bernd Roß, head of the department for technology transfer, digitization and science statistics in the Ministry of Education, the new concept. According to Karen Bruhn, who organized the joint concept work as a member of the FDM-SH project, it should not stop there. The aim of the initiative is to fill the ideas within the digitization program 3.0 planned by the state with life.