Research Data Education Alliance – Setup and Design of a research data infrastructure for empirical educational research (2nd funding phase)

Project Description

To target the multidisciplinary, broad scale nature of empirical educational research in the Federal Republic of Germany, a networked research data infrastructure is required which brings together disparate services from different research data providers, delivering services to researchers in a usable, needs-oriented way. The Verbund Forschungsdaten Bildung (Educational Research Data Alliance, VFDB) therefore aims to cooperate with relevant actors from science, politics and research funding institutes to set up a powerful infrastructure for empirical educational research. This service is meant to adequately capture specific needs of the scientific communities and support empirical educational research in carrying out excellent research.

In the second funding phase (2016-2019), DIPF, GESIS and IQB thus plan to liaise with other research data centres (FDZ) to 1) offer archiving and research data delivery services, 2) complement the online portal that was developed in the pilot phase with a search function for studies and data sources for empirical educational research and 3) support researchers in their data production processes by offering training and advice on research data management. The VFDB endorses an Open Data vision in compliance with data protection legislation and ethical principles, acknowledging first user rights of data producers.

(1) As done in the first funding phase (10/2013-09/2016), three institutes, i.e. GESIS, DIPF and IQB will continue to archive research data and prepare them for re-usage. In order to properly and sustainably address the diversity of empirical educational research, the existing offers will be linked to further relevant research data centres (FDZ). Diverse forms of cooperation are planned accounting for different conditions and competencies of the pertinent FDZ.

Contact: Doris Bambey (DIPF)

(2) The visibility and findability of research data are crucial for their preservation and re-usage. The VFDB will therefore expand the documentation of studies and data in the web portal www.forschungsdaten-bildung.de. Hence, a central reference point is provided for decentralised, locally stored data from the diverse FDZ – independent from their host servers. A metadata exchange with the portal da|ra SearchNet is realised for this purpose. Moreover, the VFDB will provide added value by linking data with pertinent publications. An important condition for central data reference services concerns the harmonisation of metadata that are used for their description and the development of standards and best practices for describing and indexing research data. In this regard, VFDB will cooperate with other FDZ from empirical educational research in the second funding phase.

(3) A range of training opportunities, information and counselling services will support researchers in producing high-quality, re-usable research data. A two-day workshop entitled “Research data management for empirical educational researchers” is developed according to the researchers’ needs which will be offered by GESIS on an annual basis. For a better outreach of the qualification measures, the existing training programme will be supported by webinars, an online discussion forum and training of multipliers (train-the-trainer). To establish the topic of research data management as part of the basic qualification for young researchers, research societies, graduate schools and summer schools will be encouraged to consider the integration of this cross-sectional issue into their planning processes.

Contact: Reiner Mauer (GESIS)

DIPF is responsible for co-ordinating the entire project, while all the project partners will be involved in working on individual tasks. Exchange with further FDZ will be subject to annual network meetings and intensified in thematic interest groups, subject to requirements.

Funding

Cooperations

• GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

• Institut zur Qualitätsentwicklung im Bildungswesen (IQB)

Project management: Doris Bambey (DIPF), Reiner Mauer (GESIS), Malte Jansen (IQB)

Publications

Project-related publications with the collaboration of DIPF staff (as of October 2016)

Project Management

Project Team

• Dr. Sonja Bayer
• Björn Buchal
• Thorsten Busert
• Ramona Gietzen
• Henning Hinze
• Nadeshda Jung
• Alexia Meyermann
• Maike Porzelt
• Dr. Dirk Weisbrod

Project Details