Managing Research Data

Creating the Common Thread

FAIR and Collaborating with the Community

Professional research data management plays a central role in all scientific disciplines today. It is not only a matter of finding an adequate solution for the individual project, but also and above all of data management that is consistently aligned with international standards. The projects of the TCDH are developed according to the FAIR principles. FAIR stands for: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - research data today should be findable and openly accessible to everyone, and it should also be possible to link it to data from other projects and contexts. Finally, research data should be available in the long term and, thus, also be reusable.

Simple Research Data Management with FuD

The virtual research environment “Research Network and Database System” FuD, which has been developed at the University of Trier since 2004 as part of the Collaborative Research Center 600 "Strangeness and Poverty" (SFB 600) and has been continuously expanded since 2015 in collaboration with the Service Center eSciences, provides researchers from the humanities and social sciences with a flexible and easy-to-use work platform. With its modular software, FuD maps the entire research process and, at the same time, supports time- and location-independent collaborative work, making the system particularly suitable for decentralized work at different locations. It enables the unification of heterogeneous data sets during data collection and archiving. Both the analysis (e.g. register creation, annotation, further text markup) and the editorial processing of the documents up to digital publication are, thus, possible in one system.

The Regional Initiative ViDa

ViDa is a virtual data repository that is especially tailored to the long-term and sustainable provision of research data, as they usually arise in research projects in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. Originating from the requirements to secure the research results of the SFB 600, the system has been further developed since then by the Service Center eSciences together with the Center for Information, Media and Communication Technology (ZIMK). Especially for the regionally related projects of the TCDH, ViDa represents the appropriate and professional solution for long-term data archiving according to the FAIR principles.

The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI)

The National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) was launched in 2018 and is currently under construction. Its goal is the accessability of (research) data from the various disciplines and scientific institutions in a uniform and systematic manner, thus, guaranteeing sustainable research data management. To this end, various consortia have been formed, organized by discipline, nine of which have already been approved by the DFG in June 2020. The University of Trier, together with the TCDH, is one of the participating institutions in the “Text+” consortium.