GitLab as a tool for Research Data Management

The collaboration of researchers locally or worldwide ranging from single researchers over a group or a lab up to cross institutional and disciplinary cooperation requires suitable working environments. Data hubs in the form of science gateways--usually abstracting from just locally shared storage resources--are discussed and explored for quite some time. While it was en vogue to propose and develop discipline specific gateways, we suggest to rely on well-established standard software frameworks instead. Research data considered over the entire data life cycle and closely related activities like annotation, versioning and sharing has a lot in common with (open source) software development. Git and GitLab--well established tools in software development--could play a major role in general research data management. From DataPLANT's point of view, GitLab as a science gateway would be a valuable addition to the NFDI [5] software landscape. It would be beneficial to address it as a joint service in cross-domain activities of all interested consortia.