Statement of the assembly of the NFDI consortia on basic services

Mon Jan 17 2022

At the consortium meeting of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) association on January 14, DataPLANT among the consortia represented therein approved the publication of a joint statement on the relevance and success criteria of basic services. Basic service may develop into one of the pillars of the future joint scientific infrastructure for research data management overarching various fields in science.

The background to this is that the DFG’s expert panel for the third round of calls for proposals has also allowed basic services consortia to apply. In December, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) published an updated timetable that governs the further procedure for applying for basic service consortia. The timeline was discussed internally at the NFDI. At the end of 2021, an internal voting process was underway, during which the statement now published was drafted. It reflects the position of the current 19 consortia on the subject of basic service consortia. The statement was approved without any dissenting votes.

DataPLANT strongly supports and welcomes the statement of the NFDI consortium meeting. It considers it extremely helpful, to define the framework to develop basic services from the “inside” of the NFDI e.V. and to link the processes closely to the sections of the association. This enables the necessary science-focused development and discussion process. A vital step along this path is the formation of a framework that includes mechanisms of generation, proposal, assessment implementation, conditions of use, and also phasing out of future services. This should orient on the life-cycle of services, based on accessibility in the sense of (subject-)specific “accessibility” and oriented towards sustainability.