5.3 bwFDM Communities – A Research Data Management Initiative in the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany

On 29 July 2014, the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts for Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany launched an e-science initiative to build up a powerful, efficient and innovative information infrastructure for all universities, research institutions and universities of applied science in south-west Germany. With an overall budget of €3.7 million, action plans in five areas, licensing, digitisation, research data management, open access and virtual research environments will be worked out over the coming years.

Within this framework an 18 month project was launched at the beginning of 2014 – ending on 30 June 2015 – to evaluate the needs of services and the support that libraries and IT service centres should offer researchers in the area of research data management. In this ‘bwFDM communities’ project, full-time key project staff have been established at all nine universities in the county (Freiburg, Heidelberg, Hohenheim, Karlsruhe, Konstanz, Mannheim, Stuttgart, Tübingen and Ulm; among them nationally and internationally highly-ranked universities). The task of the key project staff is to identity the concrete needs and requirements of all research groups working with research data (in a broad sense including all areas of science, social science and humanities) at each of the nine universities, as well as possible solutions by conducting semi-structured personal interviews and documented them in the form of user stories. More than 650 interviews have been conducted and more than 1,200 user stories documenting, showing the wide range of needs and wishes articulated by researchers. On this basis issues of importance and requirements will be identified, categorised and finalised into recommendations for concrete action plans. The final report to the Ministry is planned to be a starting point for a comprehensive research data management strategy for the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg.

The presentation will give an overview of the project results, and will highlight the roles libraries and IT service centres are expected to play from the researcher´s point of view.

Karlheinz Pappenberger has been Subject Librarian for Economics and Statistics in Communication, Information, Media Centre (KIM) Library Services at the University of Konstanz, Germany, since 1996. For a number of years, he has also specialised in research data management and usage statistics for electronic library services at the University of Konstanz. He has been involved in several third party-funded national and European projects all in the area of open access and research data management (information platform open-access.net; Open-Access Subject Repositories; OpenAIRE; OpenAIREplus; Open-Access, Publishing; MovebankVRE; bwFDM). He works within the open access group in the University of Konstanz Library, dealing with the institutional repository and promoting publishing open access and hosting open access journals at the University. He is member of the NEREUS European library network working on services for research data and open access in the field of economics. He studied Economics and Political Science at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and has been Research Assistant in Public Economics at the University of Passau, Germany.