Reaching for the Stars: Designing Open Science Services for all Scientific Disciplines

Research data infrastructures are essential for advancing open, connected, and sustainable science. A major challenge is developing cross-disciplinary, accessible, and interoperable solutions that support research data management while respecting domain-specific requirements. The German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), a collaborative network of 26 consortia, aims to address this by building a federated, sustainable infrastructure for research data across disciplines.
This workshop offers an interactive Bar Camp format to discuss the development and integration of basic services within the Base4NFDI framework – a joint initiative supporting interoperable and community-driven solutions for the entire NFDI community, defining basic services as cross-disciplinary, technical-organisational solutions that bring together existing services and leveraging existing national service components. The workshop aligns with the conference’s objective of “building the digital backbone”, highlighting how basic services can foster open science.
The target audience includes infrastructure and technical professionals, researchers and data stewards, to ensure a diverse range of perspectives. Through participatory Bar Camp sessions, attendees will:
Gain a clear understanding of what constitutes a horizontal service to serve cross-disciplinary needs and be able to explain its significance to others.
Reflect on the multi-level considerations involved in developing basic services, from technical interoperability to international alignment
Identify and discuss common challenges in service development and integration, including making services ‘FAIR’
Collaborate and share insights on building horizontal services that can be adopted across different research domains.
Participants will leave equipped to contribute to the ongoing evolution of open science infrastructures and to foster cross-community collaboration in the NFDI context.