Funding Research Data Infrastructures: Funding Criteria in Grant Peer Review

Abstract

also practical constraints exist (Borgmann 2012). In addition, research cultures concerning data sharing practices vary observably for different research fields (Tenopir et al. 2011). The German Research Foundation started a call for applications in 2010, and set up an ongoing funding programme from 2013 onwards where researchers can submit a funding proposal at any time. An additional second call in 2015 called "research data in practice" focused more on the practical utilisation of research data infrastructures as "proof of concept" in concrete research projects. The aim of the whole funding programme "Information Infrastructures for Research Data" is to improve data sharing and to support the development of tools and infrastructures in order to facilitate the distribution and access to quality assured research data. "The funding programme aims to support science and the humanities in drawing up and implementing specific and needs-oriented requirements for future structures, or structures undergoing further development, for the improved handling of research data and research data repositories." 1 Applicants for the programme are researchers cooperating with scientific information-infrastructure institutions such as libraries, archives, computing and media centres, or information science experts. Researchers applied for a funding volume of €135m, of which the DFG approved €48m for funding. The average funding volume ranges from €489,000 in the 2010 call to €668,000 in the 2015 call and €780,000 in the ongoing funding programme. To evaluate the long-term success and sustainability of the funded projects, the DFG studied the implementation of the programme in depth. The full study contains funding statistics, a descriptive analysis of the funding criteria and qualitative case studies, carried out by the Institute for Innovation and Technology (iit) at VDI/VDE Innovation + Technik GmbH, Berlin. A central question of the evaluation study was to analyse according to which criteria the review panels of the DFG choose applications for funding. For this purpose, an in-house team at the DFG analysed the content of review group protocols for 158 programme applications quantitatively. The full report contains the case studies and the descriptive analysis of the review protocols including a detailed code scheme with examples for every code (DFG 2019a). An expert commission formed by members of the Committee for Scientific Libraries and Information Systems (AWBI) and further information management experts accompanied a programme evaluation.