After several months of preparation, we submitted the DataPLANT proposal for the second funding phase. A big thank you to everyone for their professional and intellectual input, as well as to the writing team for their commitment and perseverance!
The fundamental goal of DataPLANT is to foster community participation and engagement by providing support that facilitates research data management (RDM) and FAIR compliance for researchers. It aims to bridge the gap between research operations and data management, ensuring every researcher is equipped for effective RDM without separating these concerns. DataPLANT's objectives in the second funding phase thus even focus stronger on empowering the community to "employ, contribute, govern" and are supported by technical objectives to "ensure, develop, interoperate", and integrative objectives to "deploy, network, exchange". We grew the consortium significantly to now 39 participants. By including the IPK Gaterslebenand the configuration changed to a certain degree to adapt to changing internal and external requirements.
Community Objectives: Employ, contribute, govern The DataPLANT strategy of community empowerment and engagement will enable systematic data collection at various locations using diverse methods, making data readily available for the community. This approach ensures easy, lasting, and systematic access for third parties, facilitating the combination and analysis of such data across different storage spaces, disciplines, and countries. The plant community's active involvement is supported both by geodistributed Data Stewards funded through DataPLANT and Data Stewards from partners who are embedded in our consortium. They are aided by technologies and services developed with continuous feedback and open planning involving active community participation.
Technical Objectives: Ensure, develop, interoperate DataPLANT strives to establish RDM practices, tools, procedures and services that enable collaborative research. It will provide a common framework and best practices for data handling, annotation standards, and quality control in plant science and across domains, in close collaboration with the researchers and other stakeholders, to meet the FAIR requirements.
Integrative Objectives: Deploy, network, exchange DataPLANT takes an active role in forming and applying universal, inter-consortia procedures and benchmarks in RDM alongside other consortia. At the heart of DataPLANT's strategy is the enhancement of existing services and conventions to meet the specific needs of plant researchers, rather than creating entirely new developments. This integrative strategy for achieving lasting sustainability hinges on engagement from both users and the broader community, thereby establishing a two-way, communicative structure and a disseminated, harmonized service environment.
We will work closely with the other NFDI consortia on all of these activities to push forward the development towards OneNFDI. Our next task is to prepare for the presentation of the application to the NFDI expert panel of the German Research Foundation in November 2024. The final funding decision will be made by the Joint Science Conference in summer 2025.