Cross-disciplinary user support network in NFDI4Earth

The national research data infrastructure NFDI4Earth builds a network of 65 partners to support research data management (RDM) in the earth system sciences. One of the currently established infrastructures is the user support network (USN).

The partner institutions of NFDI4Earth range from universities over research institutes to governmental agencies, all having different approaches to handle research data in their specific discipline, different support infrastructures and workflows and a different way to support users in research data handling. In most cases the local RDM support of an institution is the right place to go for researchers. But for cross-disciplinary projects it might be difficult for the single user to find the right contact person. A distributed support network can help in these cases involving several support persons dealing with one user service request.

Our ambition is to provide a high-quality data management support network for ESS researchers. In this network, already existing support institutions contribute jointly. We also collaborate with national consortium helpdesks of related disciplines to share experiences and offer an even wider support portfolio.

We present our support network, the workflows and internal organization, and address the challenges we are facing.