Becoming domain-specific experts - potentials of research data management within a priority program

Research data management (RDM) has become a core aspect of research, especially since the establishment of the FAIR-Principles (Wilkinson et al. 2016) and comprehensive infrastructure projects, e.g. the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). Besides several helpdesk services of the NFDI consortia, Universities have founded local generic RDM counseling units and domain-specific RDM centers as primary facilities that support researchers in questions regarding RDM and offer RDM (infrastructure) services.

However, large research programs (such as collaborative research centers and transregios, research training groups, excellence clusters and priority programs) often organize their RDM independently of these RDM centers through designated staff. Core aspects of this self-managed RDM are a profound knowledge of domain-specific RDM requirements and the cooperation with different stakeholders and RDM networks, like computing centers and infrastructure projects.

In our talk, we will present the RDM unit of the priority program SPP 2207 “Computational Literary Studies” funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). We will focus on approaches of measuring RDM requirement landscapes, how our work helped us identify domain-specific RDM requirements and address them together with other RDM infrastructures and initiatives.