Development of Research Data Management Support at Kiel University

Kiel University is the only comprehensive university in the federal state of Schleswig Holstein in northern Germany. Interdisciplinary cooperation between the disciplines of its eight faculties and associated research institutes lead to the establishment of its four research foci – Kiel Marine Science, Kiel Life Sciences, Kiel Nano, Surface and Interface Science and Societal, Environmental and Cultural Change. They are characterised by data-intensive research, which in recent years has led to the development of focus-specific concepts for research data management at Kiel University in collaboration with GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, University Medical Center Schleswig-Holstein, Leibniz Information Centre for Economics and others; data management solutions have evolved in different collaborative research projects, such as the Excellence Initiatives and Collaborative Research Centres. Hence, the institutional research data management of Kiel University has been strategically built and developed along the research foci. 

Since 2013, a central Research Data Management office was instituted to develop and provide sustainable research data infrastructures for Kiel University, collaborating with data management in the disciplines and research foci, the computing centre and the university library. It is the central contact for research data management at Kiel University. As such, it provides consultation and support for data management planning for research and project proposals and coordinates and brings together research data management activities, e.g., in the Research Data Management Working Group. The Research Data Management Working Group is a body spanning several institutions bringing together experts from research, management and infrastructure at Kiel as a research location. It bundles the competences of existing data management initiatives, such as Kiel Marine Science, Kiel Life Science or Societal, Environmental and Cultural Change, with the aim of developing and establishing interdisciplinary and sustainable research data management for Kiel as a research location. Current topics of research data management are dealt with in sub-working groups, e.g., development of guidelines and policies, participation at the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) or the development of the repository landscape. Third-party funded projects for further development of specific research data management topics accompany the activities. 

The activities now lead to the application of the German variant of the RISE framework (Rans and Whyte), RISE-DE (Weiss et al.), and the development of a central service office for research data management support and IT services in a collaboration of university computing centre, university library and central administration. 

The poster will detail the development of the research data management support at Kiel University towards a service office and the application of the RISE-DE framework.

References

Rans, Jonathan, and Angus Whyte. Using RISE, the Research Infrastructure Self-Evaluation Framework v.1.1. Digital Curation Centre, 27 Jan. 2017, www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/RISE.

Weiss, Nadin, et al. RISE-DE. http://www.dcc.ac.uk/webfm_send/2828. IDCC19 - 14th International Digital Curation Conference, Melbourne, Australia.