Educating data literacy – a holistic concept. A best practice example for open science education.

The poster presents a holistic concept for open science education and in particular data literacy as well as research data management [RDM] developed by the project bw2FDM in BadenWürttemberg. Faced with a multitude of courses, webinars and other training opportunities dedicated to these topics, just adding more is not an efficient approach. Rather cooperation and coordination are essential. Therefore, original content is combined with networking efforts on a state as well as federal level in order to achieve synergies.

Nevertheless, the creation of a multifaceted set of training opportunities is a core part of our project. This meshes different didactic formats. A main component is an asynchronous online course “Open Science: Von Daten zu Publikationen” [1] that covers different aspects of RDM from a practical, technical and legal view. This course has even become part of the regular curriculum at the University of Constance. It is complemented by training sessions and webinars that delve deeper into specific issues. Furthermore, bw2FDM is responsible for the information platform forschungsdaten.info, which offers a comprehensive collection of articles covering a wide variety of RDM matters. None of these services is limited to a specific institution, rather they are aimed at the entire German-speaking community.

However, bw2FDM strives to avoid insular solutions as well as duplicating the efforts of other RDMexperts. In consequence, we initiated a working group dedicated to RDM-training in BadenWürttemberg. This is not just a forum for exchange but also a nucleus for cooperative solutions to data literacy education. The same approach has been applied to foschungsdaten.info: partnerships with 18 other institutions made it possible to assemble a diverse and highly specialized editorial staff that consistently provides new content and improves the platform. Recently, a new series of webinars under the label forschungsdaten.info live has been launched that has these experts join efforts in order to tailor training session for specific scientific communities. For example, the first webinar focused on geosciences.

Last but not least, a special focus lies on sustainability. For that reason, all educational resources as well as the content of forschungsdaten.info are published under open licenses such as CC BY 4.0 or under a copyright waiver like CC0 1.0. This ensures their reusability and enables other institutions to adept the materials for their own purposes without legal limitations. Moreover, we are optimistic that our cooperative approach to RDM education will increase the long-term effectiveness of our efforts and might even serve as a blueprint for other institutions.

[1] Translation: Open Science: From data to publications.