Strategies to start cultural change in microbiology research data management –NFDI4Microbiota

NFDI4Microbiota aims to support the microbial community by providing access to data, analysis services, data/metadata standards and training. It belongs to the National Research data Infrastructure (NFDI), which aims to develop a comprehensive research data management. Different consortia ensure a broad coverage from cultural sciences, engineering to life sciences and natural science. NFDI4Microbiota intends to facilitate the digital transformation in the microbiological community (bacteriology, virology, mycology and parasitology).

The German microbial research network will be supported, and cultural change started through training and community building activities, and by creating a cloud-based system that will make the storage, integration and analysis of microbial data, especially - omics data, consistent, reproducible, and accessible. Thereby, NFDI4Microbiota will promote the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles and Open Science.

To enable FAIR data management, it is central for the NFDI4Microbiota consortium to develop and provide of the computational infrastructure and analytical workflows required to store, access, process, and interpret various microbiome-related data types. Here, NFDI4Microbiota works on developing and implementing software and standardized workflows for users to analyse their own data.

Cultural change can only happen if there is enough knowledge. Due to that, NFDI4Microbiota offers trainings, spanning from metagenomics, over courses about programming in R, to research data management and ELN (electronic lab notebooks). To interact with young scientists, the consortium launched an ambassador program, thereby helping to identify the needs of their local community. Technical solutions are developed, tested and refined in several use cases from different fields of microbiology. All relevant information and specific services are available via the web portal.