Challenges for Multi-Disciplinary Research Data Infrastructures: The Public Domain

The flood of digital data, which arises from studies in the social sciences or results from satelllite missions in earth or space sciences, is growing rapidly. The permanent storage and its provision for future generations of researchers represent a challenge to the entire science system, however, many questions still remain unresolved. Financial aspects, organizational and technology issues in creating multi-disciplinary research data infrastructures, as well as the legal and political framework need to be clarified. These challenges will be discussed in the context of this sesison, which will take the form of a discussion panel introduced by four presentations. The data life cycle will serve as the guideline for the presentations which take a closer look at its specific challenges. The overall objective is the development of a mulit-disciplinary research data infrastructure. This presentation covers the challenges of the Public Domain and present best practices.