Data management in Collaborative Research Centers: Providing a single data repository solution for three long-term, interdisciplinary research projects
Abstract
Research, conducted in collaborative research projects, requires active sharing of ideas and scientific output. Especially if these are cross-institutional, large-scale, long-term, interdisciplinary projects where scientists depend on other's research results. Thus, establishing research data management (RDM) services and a data repository are essential. Such repositories should consider research data and resulting output (e.g. publications, reports, pictures etc.).
The presented work was conducted in three Collaborative Research Centres (CRC) funded by the DFG. CRCs are cross-institutional research projects, established for up to 12 years which solve complex research questions in inter-disciplinary research environments. Results of established RDM services and infrastructure developed for the CRC/Transregio 32 'Patterns in Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Systems' (funded 2007-2018), CRC1211 'Earth - Evolution at the Dry Limit' (funded since 2016), and CRC/Transregio 228 'Future Rural Africa' (funded since 2018) are presented in this contribution. Experiences gathered in setting up services and a data repository for the CRC/Transregio 32 have been re-used for the other two CRCs. All three CRCs focus on geoscientific research questions, with contributions from other disciplines such as biology, soil and plant sciences or social sciences. Thus, very heterogeneous data have to be collected, documented, backed up, exchanged and at best published with a DOI. However, each CRC has its own needs that should be considered when setting up the infrastructure. The available repository infrastructure (www.TR32DB.de), e.g. providing data storage, sharing, publishing with DOI, interoperable metadata, data statistics, was successfully adapted and transferred to the other CRCs. This enabled a fast support and availability of the data repositories (www.CRC1211DB.uni-koeln.de, www.TRR228DB.uni-koeln.de). Additionally, each repository was complemented with special features, e.g. a special section to access project weather data in the CRC1211DB or an internal exchange platform for stories in the TRR228DB. Additionally, support services (e.g. tutorials, seminars and practical trainings) were established to promote scientists from the project start.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN14B..01C
- Keywords:
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- 1908 Cyberinfrastructure;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1912 Data management;
- preservation;
- rescue;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1930 Data and information governance;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1934 International collaboration;
- INFORMATICS