Promoting Change Towards more Data Literacy in Research

The scientific landscape is continually shifting towards increasing amounts of data, demanding a
greater investment of (time-) resources into the management of these data. As a result, data literacy
is a key element of research, which is becoming more and more important for researchers from all
domains. Additionally, interdisciplinary,multidisciplinary, and collaborative approaches are
becoming more essential now than ever before. Hence, we believe the concept and activities of the
Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy to be highly relevant to the topic and audience of
this year’s “E-Science Tage” conference.
The Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy is an initiative funded by the German Federal
ministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union. We are a consortium of nine
institutions in the Rhine-Ruhr area including universities, research institutions, and universities of
applied science. The overarching goal of the DKZ.2R is to reduce data-related hurdles in research
and support holistic, methodological data literacy in the areas of research data management,
artificial intelligence,machine learning, high performance computing, and data science. The
DKZ.2R has a strong interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focus, and is a regional center focused
primarily, but not exclusively on partners and participants in the Rhine-Ruhr area.
Our main objective is to promote a holistic methodological data literacy and offer support for
researchers to break through data related hurdles in order to find cross-domain solutions and
synergies. The regional focus of the DKZ.2R allows us to offer in-depth support, making resources
more generally available and facilitating connections between researchers and research groups
across institutions and domains. With a more flexible approach such as curating relevant and
existing trainings and seminars, identifying gaps in those resources, and creating new offers in the
form of (online) courses and seminars, we aim at supporting data literacy for researchers from all
over Germany while ensuring high quality in all of our offerings. This combination of in-depth and
more general long- and short-term solutions allows us to promote data literacy, research data
management, and machine learning skills (depending on the researcher’s needs) while constantly
adapting to the changing challenges in the scientific landscape.