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University Specific Developments
Within the cooperative network, HeFDI has enabled and supported the needs-oriented development of specific services and structures for higher education for all participating universities and university types, i.e., comprehensive universities, technical universities, universities of applied sciences (UAS) and new types of universities.
It is questionable, for example, to what extent the situation at universities of applied sciences requires special procedures and/or resources. From HeFDI's point of view, research data management offers a unique opportunity, especially for universities of applied sciences and for the new types of universities, which together make up more than half of HeFDI's member universities. Especially at the UAS, which are strong in research, quality assured RDM is just as central an element of quality assurance as it is for research at the universities. At the same time, the initial situation in terms of science policy, with newly founded doctoral centres and the ongoing institutional bundling of interdisciplinary, application-oriented research in scientific centres and research associations, offers particularly favourable conditions for an early, sustainable anchoring of RDM. At the same time, it is becoming apparent that this type of higher education institution is partly confronted with special framework conditions regarding the implementation of RDM, which requires specific concepts for RDM.
Through the participation of Fulda University of Applied Sciences in the associated BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) joint project FOKUS, the first practical steps were taken, together with the five universities involved, towards training in research data management in the course of the new independent right to award doctorates, and experiences with specific subject foci at the universities were exchanged. Likewise, the research data experts of all participating UAS have compiled the specifics of their university type at the working level and elicited consequences. This broad spectrum of experiences and demand impulses has shown on the one hand that the UAS have different framework conditions in the area of RDM compared to the universities, and on the other hand that there are specific opportunities with regard to their own university structure, their orientation in research and their cooperation partners. In 2019, HeFDI organised, among other things, a workshop on research data management at UAS.
