Project management: Prof. Dr. Roland Hardenberg
Project staff: Carlos Magnavita
Duration: January 2025 – September 2025
Funding: Hahn-Hissink Frobenius Foundation
In addition to publishing research findings, managing research data is now considered part of good scientific practice. Major research funding agencies in Germany and abroad, such as the DFG, the BMFTR, and the ERC, require applicants for new projects to submit a plan for handling data generated in the course of research activities. As an institution with significant external funding, the Frobenius Institute also recognized this new reality in research and therefore took steps to improve the organization, structure, and capacity of its in-house research data management (RDM).
One of the Frobenius Institute’s four thematic research priorities is “Cultural Anthropological Archaeology and Historical Ethnology,” a research area that is heavily funded by external grants. Given this particularity and the fact that some archaeological projects are part of this focus area, a nine-month project tailored to archaeology was implemented to meet the new requirements for research data management (RDM). Funded by the Hahn-Hissink Frobenius Foundation, the project aimed to develop a plan or template for research data management (RDM) that is as comprehensive and universal as possible for current and future projects in the field of cultural anthropological archaeology. The foundations of this plan were developed and implemented based on existing research data from an externally funded archaeological project at the institute that runs through June 2025. At the heart of the plan is the collection of various types of research data, the preparation of this data, the description of the associated metadata, and finally the upload of the data packages to a suitable research data repository. A research data repository is a digital storage location for scientific data that enables its storage, publication, accessibility, and long-term archiving (at least 10 years). It is particularly important that this data be assigned unique persistent identifiers (DOIs) upon publication to guarantee both its citability and discoverability.
The Goethe University’s institutional repository (GUDe) was selected for the research data published as part of the project. The Frobenius Institute has already concluded a cooperation agreement with this institution in various areas. It is therefore also recommended to use GUDe as the target repository for research data from future archaeological projects at the institute—particularly due to the (currently) free service and the comparatively simple publication process.
