According to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), research data and its associated infrastructures must be far better protected against a broad and growing range of threats in the future. An ad hoc working group of the Senate of Germany’s largest research funding organisation and central self-governing organisation for science and the humanities has now presented its “Recommendations on the Resilience of Research Data Infrastructures”. These are directed at researchers, scholarly societies, funding organisations and policymakers, with the aim of promoting coordinated initiatives among all stakeholders.
The paper is the first statement issued by the working group, which comprises members of the DFG Senate and Executive Committee and is chaired by Vice Presidents Professor Dr. Britta Siegmund and Professor Dr. Johannes Grave. The group was established last year to develop proposals aimed at enhancing the resilience of academia and the research system across multiple domains, in response to current challenges.
The publication is set against two key developments. Firstly, research data is becoming increasingly important in almost all academic disciplines and is now a “key resource of strategic importance to research, innovation and knowledge sovereignty”, as the paper states.
At the same time, however, this data – and in particular the highly technical digital infrastructures required for its processing and dissemination – are becoming increasingly vulnerable, as both the number and intensity of external threats grow. The working group notes that “cyberattacks, institutional crises, ideologically motivated funding decisions and geopolitical tensions can lead to the manipulation of data, massive data loss, and loss of access to data.” Current examples cited include restrictions affecting life science and medical data, publication databases hosted in the United States (GenBank and PubMed), as well as data programmes used for climate and environmental research.
In view of this, the DFG Senate working group calls on policymakers and the research community to ensure the strategic and long-term safeguarding of research data infrastructures. “Funding for research data infrastructure should, in key areas, be regarded as part of essential public services and therefore a core national responsibility that must not be left solely to private or market-based actors,” the paper states. Reference is also made to the fact that the safeguarding of data repositories has been included in the federal government’s coalition agreement and is the subject of ongoing debate in the German Bundestag.
Consolidation of existing initiatives is seen by the working group as a vital first step, including the Funding Initiative to Secure Endangered Data Repositories and Promote Data Resilience launched at the end of 2025, which is financed by the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and administered by the DFG. Consortia such as the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) are also said to offer a sound basis to build on.
According to the paper, however, funding for a resilient data infrastructure should not be concentrated in a single funding organisation in the longer term, nor should it be focused on a single European country. Instead, it calls for models of cross-border European and international funding to be developed, with the involvement of additional federal ministries and foundations, as well as measures that address the deployment of highly qualified personnel and the issue of how such personnel can be prevented from moving to the private sector.
Researchers themselves, the working group emphasises, should likewise handle their own data appropriately and responsibly by applying discipline-specific standards and making use of supra-regional infrastructures for its description, archiving and curation. The paper also states that the informed use of open-source products of European origin can help reduce dependencies on commercial products and contribute to greater digital sovereignty.
Finally, the working group emphasised that scholarly societies and disciplinary associations should in future coordinate more closely at both national and international level – both among themselves and with relevant infrastructure providers –to develop concrete measures for building a resilient data infrastructure.
Further Information
Full text of the recommendations (link to Information for Researchers)
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