Data Management Perspectives from a Leading European Institute in Plant Research
Creators: name: Rey-Mazón, Elena
name: Lange, Matthias
name: Schüler, Danuta
name: Arend, Daniel
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: The Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK) is a research institute focused on the elucidation of the fundamental principles of evolution, development and adaptation operating in our leading crop plants – cereals, grain legumes and oilseed plants. Participative, inter-institutional and cross-hierarchical data stewardship is an essential factor for transparency and trust in data management. In addition, its incorporation into the strategic development along with continuous reflection of demands is essential for sustainable research data management. We will present how this process can be successful and what obstacles exist on the basis of the IPK’s research data strategy concept.

The IPK is embedded in the Leibniz Research Association and its framework for Research Data Management (RDM) (Cremer, F. et al.), and is a national and international driving actor for the implementation of the FAIR principles on technical and structural levels as well as the provision of data stewardship services (Arend, D., et al.). Within the institute, the Bioinformatics and Information Technology group (BIT) accompanies the scientists alongside the Research Data Life Cycle towards FAIR and CARE data management (Wilbrandt, J. et al.).

The entry point are data stewardship services to organize data effectively and ensure long-term usability and accessibility. This comprises especially activity in scope of metadata acquisition or the documentation of projects, experiments and data flows. This clear and consistent metadata enables researchers to facilitate data discovery, interoperability, and reusability. Doing so, BIT offers training programs and resources to enhance researchers' understanding of RDM best practices. This is complemented by support services, such as Data Management consultations or workshops, to assist researchers in implementing effective data management strategies.

As a technical infrastructure, we provide a general-purpose RDM system in the form of a Laboratory Information System (LIMS) as a technical integration point for data flows, collaborative metadata decoration and data storage for the publication of datasets (Mayer, G. et al.). It is well adopted for some core processes, but it lacks its full potential as general-purpose hub for a high-quality data centre. One of the problems is a consistent and quality assurance requirement engineering for data from various research projects and sustainable concepts from both researchers and PIs.

IPK initiated a transformation process to convert the experience from different pilot areas of data management, such as sequencing data (Plant genomic and genetic variation data submission to EMBL-EBI databases) or genebank management (Weise, S.) into an institute-wide bioinformatics concept. Based on the RISE and RISE-DE framework (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3516620) for self-evaluation and strategic RDM development, the aim is to implement the developed best practices and data flows across the IPK.

With this presentation we will show the current status of institutional RDM, the challenges we face and the solutions we propose to improve the quality of research in our institute.

Acknowledgment. This work was created as part of the NFDI consortium FAIRagro (www.fairagro.net). We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)) – project number 501899475.