Overview of the availability of tools and services for early data mobilization

NFDI4Biodiversity  already provides a wide variety of useful tools for early project data mobilization, many of which go beyond the initial stages of the data life cycle. Data provision can be handled by BEXIS2 and RightField opens the door for researchers, who have not yet dismissed the spreadsheet but want to implement the FAIR principles into their work. The Biodiversity Workbench and BioMe on the other hand provide powerful frameworks to manage data, from their collection until the end of the project, providing necessary functionality at the early stages that will be relevant when data will be published or shared eventually. However, these tools are not yet incorporated into the aforementioned RDC NFDI4Biodiversity aims to establish.

 Services for Early Data Mobilization from related NFDI consortia

The overall goal of the NFDI is to increase awareness for the importance of research data and research data management and to establish infrastructure, services and tools to ultimately create workflows and automated processes for researchers within and beyond different scientific disciplines. Nomad and the PLANTDataHub work adjacent to the idea of NFDI4Biodiversity’s Research Data Commons, by providing infrastructure that combines several aspects from different phases of the data life cycle. NOMAD and the PLANTDataHub are already usable for scientists from the respective disciplines. Experiences from the development, initialisation and subsequent community acceptance of these services can be useful in establishing and further developing the Research Data Commons platform within the discipline of biodiversity science. ELNs are a tool to overhaul the way data is traditionally collected and processed. This entails the development of suitable software, the allocation of storage space on (locally) hosted servers for the collected data that are available long term, secure and maintainable,  but also the availability of input devices which, especially in biodiversity sciences, need to be able to withstand fieldwork and laboratory conditions. Currency ELNs remain individual solutions for local institutions. These are just a few highlights of services other consortia provide, mainly for their own community. Not mentioned here are knowledge bases many consortia provide to explain and guide users regarding research data management. The project base4NFDI tries to consolidate a lot of services from the different consortia into single access points but does not yet focus on tools concerning  early data mobilization.

State Initiatives, forschungsdaten.info, and the DINI/nestor AG Forschungsdaten

Of the 16 states of Germany, only two do not have a dedicated state initiative working on research data management, support and infrastructure. Only 6 of those offer an ELN, often in direct cooperation with a local university where the instance is hosted. Additionally a variety of services, ranging from certification courses, Research Data Management (RDM) consultations, events, Repositories and many more are provided. The visibility of these state initiatives also varies.

forschungsdaten.info is a portal for RDM related knowledge. It bundles information about the state initiatives, the NFDI consortia, international infrastructures, their tools and services, as well as some basic introductory information regarding RDM. The website is maintained by a national team of RDM specialists.

The UAG Schulung und Fortbildung of the DINI/nestor AG Forschungsdaten provides a comprehensive workshop concept (meant to teach RDM trainers), which is modular, expandable and can easily be adapted to teach researchers, whose main focus will not be on teaching RDM, but on using RDM within their research.

Training Modules and miscellaneous services

NFDI4Biodiversity

In support of students and early-career scientists who want to learn the basics of RDM we provide an open educational resource on the topic research data management (Selbstlerneinheit), containing valuable information on all stages of the data life cycle. This is the easiest entry point into RDM, as it will provide a basic understanding and be a guide for further reading. Additionally, NFDI4Biodiversity supports teachers and students of RDM with video series published on Youtube, with topics ranging from Basics of RDM, services provided and tutorials on how to use them, as well as the handling of data in general. The consortium provides GitHub Repositories usable as working environments for Jupyter, R and data validation in PANGAEA, and a Zenodo-Community where slides and other material is published for reuse.

NFDI4Biodiversity provides custom trainings for biodiversity related institutions, working groups and projects on the following topics:

• Creating a Data Management Plan (DMP)
• Data annotation
• Data publication
• Data archiving
• Data submission via Data Submission Service
• Metadata standards
• Legal aspects in research data management
• Naming conventions and taxonomic harmonization
• Legal regulations for handling biodiversity and environmental data
• Introductions to working with our tools and services
• Fundamentals of research data management and data literacy
• General introduction to NFDI4Biodiversity and the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)

We also provide yearly Seasonal Schools for PhD students, researchers, data collectors or data center staff members, offering a broad range of basic and advanced knowledge in the management of biodiversity, ecology and environmental data. The intensive courses include input presentations from experts and hands-on exercises and are tailored to the attendees prior expertise.

The seasonal schools are designed to create an open, collaborative environment that invites networking and knowledge sharing among participants and can therefore facilitate early data mobilization by furthering the participants knowledge on available tools and services, workflows and best practices.

All of these teaching and training materials and the information about the events can be found on the NFDI4Biodiversity website and its Knowledgebase.

Other relevant NFDI Consortia and the RDMTraining4NFDI from Base4NFDI