Project Duration: July 2014 – September 2017

As part of the digital transformation of science, researchers are increasingly being asked to document and archive the research data underlying their findings alongside their publications. In its “Principles for Handling Research Data,” the Alliance of Science Organizations advocates, among other things, for the long-term preservation of research data and commits to the principles of open access, since research data constitute an important cornerstone of scientific knowledge and, regardless of their original purpose of collection, can often serve as the basis for further research. The German Research Foundation (DFG) incorporates these ideas into its recommendations for ensuring good scientific practice and stipulates that “primary data, as the basis for publications, should be stored on durable and secure media at the institution where they were generated for a period of ten years.”

Against the backdrop of existing university infrastructures and workflows related to the submission of electronic dissertations, the bwDataDiss project—funded by the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts—aims to pragmatically expand these existing infrastructures to include the ability to describe, submit, and permanently store the research data associated with a dissertation. In line with the Royal Society of Chemistry’s principle of “Intelligent Openness,” the project also seeks to establish a general consensus within universities that research data should, in principle, be preserved—even if, for data protection or contractual reasons, such data may be accessible only to the doctoral candidate and their advisors, at least temporarily.

The expansion of existing services for the submission of electronic dissertations will be developed as pilot projects at KIT and the University of Freiburg and then rolled out to other universities in Baden-Württemberg in the third year of the project.