Open academic communication: Germany approaches a European level | BMBF Humanities & Social Sciences / Federal Ministry of Education and Research

For social sciences and humanities (SSH), digitalization offers great opportunities for research and education. Therefore, research data infrastructures need to be established and expanded – throughout Germany and Europe. At the same time, research data need to be managed professionally.

As the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) together with the German Länder is integrating already established infrastructures into a National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), there still is the need to embed national infrastructures into a quickly developing infrastructure landscape on a European level. Beside this, one of the most prominent challenges remains: to efficiently coordinate research activities from multiple disciplines, based on different skills and organized in several countries.

“SSH research and scholarly communication practices are divided across a wide array of disciplines and languages. While this specialization makes it possible to investigate the extensive variety of SSH topics, it also leads to a fragmentation that prevents SSH research from gaining its full potential. It makes it costly to bring together research results and to reach a higher impact on the society”, says Judith Schulte, communication officer for OPERAS, based at the Max Weber Foundation (MWF).