Speaker
Description
The growing importance of research data management (RDM) in academia goes hand in hand with an increasing diversification of tools and methods. At the same time, it remains essential to meet generic needs through robust infrastructures. In North Rhine-Westphalia, a state wide concept on RDM, the “Landeskonzept FDM”, was published 2024 as a strategy in which universities set out chief objectives for state-wide RDM infrastructures. The implementation of this concept supervised by the state initiative fdm.nrw, is based on the state’s decision to fund central generic services and infrastructures for all universities. This allows participating universities to meet the generic needs of their researchers while simultaneously enabling them to develope locally specific profiles and priorities. The state-wide infrastructure, consisting of several, interoperable RDM state services, is designed to be integrated into concurrent developments, as they emerge in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The RDM state services in NRW consist of both technical and non-technical infrastructures. Together they support researchers in learning research data management practices, tailoring them to their own needs, and integrating them into their own research. In this way, the state of NRW contributes to strengthening the digital sovereignty and performance of universities in handling research data.
This presentation provides an overview of the higher education policy context surrounding the development of RDM in North Rhine-Westphalia and introduces specific RDM state services.