Eight universities of applied sciences and five universities from Rhineland-Palatinate sign cooperation agreement for the Research Data Management Network Rhineland-Palatinate (FDM-RLP)
In research, large amounts of digital research data are created every day. To ensure that this data is preserved in the long term and can be found, accessed, reused and technically interoperable by other researchers as well as the public, this large amount of research data must be managed professionally. To this end, eight universities of applied sciences and five universities from Rhineland-Palatinate have signed a cooperation agreement for the Research Data Management Network Rhineland-Palatinate (FDM-RLP).
Since research is often financed by taxpayers' money, public third-party funders are increasingly demanding that data be published on appropriate platforms, so-called repositories. This poses a great challenge for the researchers themselves and their institutions, as they are asked to generate and prepare digital data in a quality-assured manner, to document the processing procedures without gaps, and to keep them available in the long term. In order for researchers to meet these requirements, they need support at many points in the research process from science management and from various science-supporting infrastructure facilities, such as data centers and libraries.
Since 2020, employees from eight universities of applied sciences in Rhineland-Palatinate (Kaiserslautern, Koblenz, Mainz, Trier, Worms, Ludwigshafen, Bingen and the Catholic University of Mainz) and five universities (Mainz, Kaiserslautern, Koblenz-Landau, Trier and the German University of Administrative Sciences Speyer) have therefore been regularly exchanging information on the topic of research data management (FDM) . This gave rise to the state network FDM-RLP, which has now been given a binding character by a cooperation agreement between the participating universities.
The network aims to establish the FAIR-Data principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) at the universities in RLP, to promote the consulting and information services on FDM at the participating partners, and to exchange information with the consortia for the development of national research data infrastructures (NFDI), with the help of which subject-specific standards and services for research data management are being developed within the framework of a federal-state program. Coordinators of the FDM-RLP network are currently Dr. Anne Vieten (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz) and Marina Lemaire (University of Trier).
The FDM-RLP network is thus intended to bring support services for research data management to the universities of applied sciences and universities in Rhineland-Palatinate. The now concluded state-wide cooperation is thus a further building block for making digital data from research accessible and usable for third parties.
