NFDI4ING at E-Science Days 2025

From 12 to 14 March 2025, the E-Science Days 2025 took place under the motto ‘Research Data Management: Challenges in a Changing World’ both in presence at the University of Heidelberg and online. The E-Science Days are an interdisciplinary conference series on the topics of research data management and open science – with a wide range of opportunities for professional exchange between science and infrastructure.

NFDI4ING heavily contributed to the event, presenting several services and initiatives in talks, posters and workshops:

• Coscine:
  As part of the research data platform Coscine, two elementary processes were presented: allocation processes for research data storage and the agile software development process. NFDI4ING is involved in both developments. Allocation processes are designed to ensure that limited storage resources are used sensibly and that the FAIR principles are observed in their use. In the agile software development processes, Coscine relies on the participation of various stakeholders to prioritise further development to cover additional aspects of the research data life cycle.
• ing.grid: The diamond open access journal ing.grid, dedicated to FAIR data management in engineering, shared its experiences with Open Peer Review. Accepting manuscripts, datasets, and software, the journal fosters transparency and reproducibility. Discussions at the event addressed key challenges, such as attracting reviewers and acknowledging their contributions. The poster presented is available here (link).
• RDMO & DMP4NFDI: NFDI4ING offers RDMO, a tool for creating data management plans (DMPs), which forms the foundation for the NFDI-wide basic service DMP4NFDI. During a dedicated workshop, the draft for a unified standard for DMPs across the NFDI was discussed. NFDI4ING also coordinates the NFDI DMP Working Group, which presented its work via a poster, which is available here (link).
• JoDaKISS: The newly launched diamond open access journal JoDaKISS was introduced through a poster presentation. JoDaKISS publishes peer-reviewed data sets from experiments and simulations, as well as associated software. The submission process involves reviewing previously published data sets for scientific originality and adherence to best practices and standards, ensuring high-quality, reproducible research.
• License Checker: The License Checker supports researchers in selecting appropriate open source licenses. It provides an overview of common licenses, checks compatibility, and extracts licensing information from existing code and dependencies. The service is being developed further under the LARA working group (Licensing & Agreement Rule Automation) within the NFDI section ELSA. The presentation slides are available here (link).
• pubWorkflow: Another talk highlighted pubWorkflow, a scalable tool designed for quality assurance in engineering-focused data repositories. Integrated into the publication workflow of Dataverse-based repositories, it performs automated checks to support data curation and maintain quality standards. Further information on the specific quality criteria is available here (link). The slides are published on Zenodo (link).

We enjoyed presenting our work in Heidelberg and the productive and stimulating discussions on open science and research data management. We are looking forward to the E-Science Days 2026!