Researchers in the fields of chemistry and cultural studies now have access to new services for publishing research data. These are based on the established RADAR repository from FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure.
As part of its collaboration in NFDI4Chem, FIZ Karlsruhe now offers “RADAR4Chem”, a powerful service for researchers in the field of chemistry to easily publish their research data. RADAR4Chem complements the existing portfolio of subject repositories in chemistry and can be used by researchers free of charge and regardless of their institutional affiliation. It enables the publication of any data type and format, thereby offering various application scenarios. Another new repository called RADAR4Culture similarly addresses the cultural sciences and humanities.
The NFDI aims to build on existing infrastructures and services and make them interoperable. In this context, discipline-specific repositories for the publication and long-term archiving of digital research data are of particular importance for the scientific communities. However, existing offerings do not cover all relevant use cases in scientific practice, as analyses by the NFDI consortia have shown. A generically oriented data repository such as RADAR from FIZ Karlsruhe can help close these gaps.
About Radar
RADAR is a service designed to meet the needs of researchers and has proven its worth over several years. So far, it has been used primarily by academic institutions for institutional research data management. In keeping with its claim to sustainability, FIZ Karlsruhe is now making RADAR directly accessible to researchers and adapting the service for the two new offerings – RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture – to the respective discipline-specific requirements.
Dr. Felix Bach, head of the research data department at FIZ Karlsruhe and co-spokesperson of NFDI4Chem, explains: “RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture expand the range of options for FAIR data publication in the disciplines of chemistry and cultural sciences and humanities within the framework of the NFDI. Hereby, we provide scientists with a low-threshold solution that enables them to publish digital data together with descriptive metadata and Digital Object Identifiers (DOI). “
Powerful and reliable tools
“With NFDI4Chem, we want to initiate a cultural change in research data management in chemistry,” says Christoph Steinbeck, Professor of Analytical Chemistry, Chemical Informatics and Chemometrics at the University of Jena and NFDI4Chem spokesperson. “For this, we need powerful and reliable tools from renowned partners such as RADAR4Chem from FIZ-Karlsruhe. It will provide a repository that researchers can rely on. And that will allow data to be stored without major hurdles.
Prof. York Sure-Vetter, director of the NFDI, also considers the launch of RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture an important achievement: “To make data treasures available on a broad scale, research data management is needed that starts with the researchers themselves. The services RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture enable academics to share (meta)data with their communities and ensure their reusability. Both data repositories thus are an essential step towards a sustainable research data management and a crucial milestone for NFDI.”
The technical infrastructure for RADAR is operated in Germany and is therefore subject to German law. For RADAR4Chem and RADAR4Culture, a storage quota is provided free of charge by FIZ Karlsruhe and the cooperating data centres at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and the Technical University (TU) Dresden. This means that researchers who want to make their data available FAIRly do not have to pay any publication or usage fees. Like RADAR, the two new services also enable the publication of any data types and formats and thus allow a wide range of application scenarios.
Researchers from the respective subject communities who would like to use RADAR services can find more information on the websites of FIZ Karlsruhe and the subject consortia NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Culture.
