The importance of interlinking Research Data Infrastructures and Research Data Management initiatives

Abstract

A core element of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) initiative in Germany is the ambition to harmonize the research data landscape not only on a national level, but to connect to and intertwine with international initiatives in Research Data Management (RDM).  In the context to increase the interoperability between different research data domains, metadata standardization, controlled vocabularies, application programming and the setup of different service interfaces are key areas of interest. As such, the NFDI is the German contributor to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), and strives to become a central contact point between German and international stakeholders. To achieve such a harmonized, interoperable and international data landscape, the NFDI Consortium for Earth System Sciences (NFDI4Earth) is open to promote common standards to the national Earth System Science (ESS) community and to support the development of new RDM pathways by connecting and actively participating in international initiatives. NFDI4Earth also strives to foster a cultural change towards increased awareness of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and Open Science principles in Germany. Having a user-friendly technical infrastructure, meaningful services, as well as up-to-date educational resources are all important elements in NFDI4Earth to advance the cultural shift in the ESS research community towards FAIR and open research data management.  Another important part of the cultural change is to acknowledge data and software publications as scientific merit and to recognize those as part of scientific achievements.