Cultural Change in the NFDI
Without cultural change there is no sustainable research data sharing.
Infrastructures & People
There is a symbiotic relationship between research infrastructures and cultural change in academia. This change entails designing and enabling collective and collaborative practices, e.g., quality standards, evaluation criteria, and funding schemes, that are followed and embraced by communities. These communities build shared values around the common understanding that FAIRness and Openness if all contributions to research are more relevant than currently prevailing means to define ‘impact’ and ‘value’ with a focus on ‘outputs’. Cultural change needs to involve all parts of the common infrastructure, so that systems’ designs - hardware, software, standards, rules, guidelines - furthers the new collaborative and collective culture. This new culture has to spread widely to be sustainable and effective and must transcend the borders of institutions, disciplines, and eventually countries. The NFDI consortia are designed to develop and promote improved practices of research data management, but jointly they can support a more far-reaching cultural change. Their sustainable infrastructures and community leadership will drive and sustain transdisciplinary cultural change.
Data as Humus
Data are neither ‘gold’ nor ‘oil’. They are precious but do not burn dirty and can become part of something new. An interesting and more useful metaphor is ‘humus’. In a shared information infrastructure, a project grows on FAIRly shared data. ‘Data’ is as a force, or an element, of a shared ecology. Data as humus is the foundation for knowledge.
Innovation
Research data as a resource for an innovation driven society is of a completely new type: shared data is not lost! Its worth increases by connecting it to other resources and by allowing for new uses. Data cannot be depleted by sharing. A society that commits to sharing research data openly is choosing a beneficial strategy that fosters transfer, innovation, and sovereignty.
Publications
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Contribute your use case of cultural change: https://t1p.de/cc-cases
Steps Towards a Cultural Change for Sharing Research Data
CoRDI 2023
Sustainable Research Data Management Rooted in Governance, Incentives, and Training
CoRDI 2025
Timeline
2023-04-17
The CC-BY-US event series on Cultural Change is intended as an open platform to facilitate discussions on the topic of sharing research data and to raise awareness of data sharing. The kick-off event brings together different understandings of the term and develops and discusses initial definitions of cultural change.
https://events.nfdi4culture.de/event/13/
https://nfdi4culture.de/events/cc-by-us-cultural-change-in-sharing-research-data-with-and-through-the-nfdi.html
Miro Board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVMTHQ3nk=/
2023-07-03
The second part of the Cultural Change series at the NFDI is all about infrastructures. How can cultural change promote the use of infrastructures, how do infrastructures promote cultural change?
https://events.nfdi4culture.de/event/25/
https://nfdi4culture.de/events/cc-by-us-part-2.html
2023-09-07
Steps Towards a Cultural Change for Sharing Research Data (CoRDI poster)
Abstract: https://doi.org/10.52825/cordi.v1i.278
Poster: https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.8333775
2023-11-09
Where do we stand in the NFDI when it comes to sharing data? What are there incentives but also barriers to sharing data? And last but not least: Quo vadis? What can cultural change look like and what would we like to achieve as the ideal state of data sharing? The aim of the workshop is to kick off the process of writing a white paper that outlines the current state of cultural change and shows perspectives for the future.
2024 - 2025
Why is cultural neccessary and in which fields of action must change take place? In an ongoing iterative and inclusive co-writing process, CC-BY-US contributors work on analysis and recommendations for drivers of cultural change in an innovative research ecosystem.
2025
Sustainable Research Data Management Rooted in Governance, Incentives, and Training
Talk at CoRDI 2025 track RDM in Context, Session 1: _Changing Minds, Changing Practices: Culture and Community in Research Data Management
KonsortSWD | Duisburg-Essen University
KonsortSWD, Base4NFDI | GESIS - Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences
NFDI-MatWerk | Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
NFDI4Earth | Technische Universität Dresden
NFDI4Culture | Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz - Digitale Akademie
(until 2023)
NFDI4Earth | Technische Universität Dresden
NFDI4Culture | Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz - Digitale Akademie
(until 2023)
NFDI4Culture | Pausanio GmbH & Co. KG
(until 2023)
NFDI4Culture | Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz - Digitale Akademie
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)
NFDI4Culture, HERMES | Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz - Digitale Akademie
PUNCH4NFDI | Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
NFDI4BioDiversity | GFBio - German Federation for Biological Data
Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur (NFDI) e.V.
Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg
