From local to global: Community services in interdisciplinary research data management

GEOMAR research covers a unique range of physical, chemical, biological and geological ocean processes. The department Digital Research Services develops and provides advice and tools to support scientific data workflows, including metadata description of expeditions, model experiments, lab experiments, and samples. Our focus lies on standardized internal data exchange in large interdisciplinary scientific projects and citable data and software publications in discipline specific repositories to meet the FAIR principles. GEOMAR aims at providing their services not only internally but as a collaborative RDM platform for marine projects as a community service. How to achieve this on the operational level is currently worked on jointly with other research institutions in community projects, e.g. within the DAM (German Alliance of Marine Research), the DataHUB, an initiative of several research centres within the Helmholtz research area Earth and Environment, and within the national research infrastructure NFDI4Earth, a network of more than 60 partners.  

Our latest use cases are the inclusion of the seismic data and numerical model simulations into the community portals to increase their visibility and reusability. We present the success stories and pitfalls of bringing a locally well established system in larger communities and address the challenges we are facing.