FlexFunds in the area of research data management

Further development of tools

Together with the NFDI, we support research data management to become a routine part of the research process. To this end, we fund tools (e.g. software, scripts or portals) for the management of sensitive research data in particular (software, scripts, portals, …). Applications that are based on robust preliminary work or existing tools and already utilise or make use of the possibilities of AI are particularly welcome. Additions to the existing range of services would be of great interest in the following areas:

a) Open LLM, e.g. for the curation and findability of data
b) Anonymisation tools
c) Annotation tools for e.g. audio and video data
d) Data security when accessing sensitive data
e) and more.

The target group is: Researchers and infrastructure providers who develop tools, databases, etc. for research data management in corresponding projects and wish to contribute these to the NFDI. We also explicitly call for applications that are not related to research data centres.

Download Call for Proposals [German]

Solutions for specific problems in research data management

KonsortSWD – NFDI4Society promotes multidisciplinary use cases that contribute to the development of solutions for complex challenges in data management such as documentation, archiving, re-use and interoperability. Such use cases can be developed, for example, within the framework of research groups, projects or clusters of excellence. They should be orientated towards practical problems, be transferable and ‘suitable for imitation’ and be cross-disciplinary. They can also be worked on in collaboration with other NFDI consortia. The resources provided are used to jointly develop effective solutions.

Examples of tried and tested cooperation beyond the social, behavioural, educational and economic sciences include:

• NFDI4Biodiversity – e.g. for data from socio-ecological research projects.
• NFDI4Earth – e.g. when linking spatial environmental and climate data with data from the social and economic sciences, infrastructures, e.g. for linking sensitive spatio-temporal data with earth observation data.
• NFDI4Energy – e.g. for social science data related to energy (e.g. for acceptance research on the energy transition or energy industry data) or energy technology data for social science research questions (e.g. in the context of smart grids).
• Text+ – e.g. voice recordings that are used for both linguistic analysis and social science evaluation with the challenge of (pseudo-)anonymisation, recording quality, data format of transcription/annotation, technical support for annotation, long-term archiving, discipline-agnostic description through metadata.

The target group is: Researchers who document, develop, publish, share, … data for which there are no existing procedures / solutions / workflows due to the interdisciplinary nature of the data.

Download Call for Use cases [German]

• KonsortSWD-FF-Template-2026 [rtf-Datei]
• KonsortSWD-FF-Kalkulation-2026 [xlsx-Datei]