Our SFB 1313 researchers Bernd Flemisch (projects D03 and INF) and Hamza Oukili (project INF) co-hosted together with Florian Goth (University of Würzburg) a meet-up of INF and Z0X projects in Collaborative Research Centres (CRCs) on 10 June 2026. The nation-wide online meet-up followed earlier on-site events in Göttingen (2013, 2018) and Cologne (2024), as well as a recent kick-off session at deRSE26 in Stuttgart. 87 participants from CRCs across Germany registered to the event, that brought together Data Stewards, Research Software Engineers (RSEs), and infrastructure leads. The goal of the initiative was to start a national community to bridge domain sciences through shared data architectures and software pipelines.
The event had a "Poster Blitz" of various CRCs and main presentations by National Initiatives of RSEs, Data Stewardship and NFDI. Furthermore, nine parallel technical breakout sessions took place for tool demonstrations.
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Collaborative Research Centres, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), are a cornerstone of Germany's third-party funding landscape, bringing together researchers from different disciplines around shared scientific questions over periods of up to twelve years. As digital tools have become central to the research process – from data collection and analysis to publication and long-term archiving — CRCs have increasingly pooled these responsibilities in dedicated sub-projects known as INF projects (German: "Informationsmanagement und Informationsinfrastruktur"). Typically, these units provide research data management (RDM) and research software engineering (RSE) services to all projects within a CRC, while contending with the particular demands of interdisciplinary, long-running collaborations.
Outlook: Next Workshop on 25 September 2026
The newly established network will hold its next meeting on 25 September 2026 from 9:00 to 12:30, this time as an event of the de-RSE Collaboration Workshop in Göttingen.
This follow-up session will focus on deepening the technical discussions on shared data architectures and collaborative software development within CRCs.
Advance registration is required. Interested participants can register directly via the following link: https://events.hifis.net/event/3249/registrations/.