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Collaborative Working

Digital Opportunities in Research Alliances

Cooperative research projects with several partners are increasingly characterised by a transnational as well as interdisciplinary character. This brings about additional challenges in the management of research data, which can be addressed through coordinated data management planning and collaborative working practices. The implementation of data management should therefore be planned jointly. Moreover, agreed procedures and responsibilities should be recorded in a project policy and a data management plan.

Challenges in managing research data in collaborative work include, for example, the joint organisation and processing of data and documents under what may be different methodological or disciplinary requirements. Setting standards for folder structures, file naming, metadata, file formats and even entire workflows is also essential. The provision of shared storage as well as access to and transfer of research data between different research institutions, taking data security and data protection into account, are further challenges.

There is a broad field of special tools for joint, location-independent academic work with data, which enable sustainable and reproducible research in the sense of the rules of good research practice, especially through the documentation of research processes and data processing.