Research Data Act: Incremental Step in the Right Direction?

by Christian Busse (German Cancer Research Center – DKFZ)

The Research Data Act (Forschungsdatengesetz, FDG) was at the centre of attention in one session offered at this year’s Barcamp Open Science in Potsdam. It is a proposed federal law in Germany, which aims to improve and simplify data access by researchers, both from public and private entities. In March 2024, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) published a paper outlining the planned key aspects of the Research Data Act (German). The publication of a complete draft of the act was expected for November 2024, but this timeline was delayed due to the break-up of the governing coalition. It is however assumed that the process will resume after the upcoming federal elections.

Key aspects of the FDG

We started the session with a short summary on the expected content of the FDG and the current state of the legislative process. The four key aspects of the FDG are:

1. Better access to public sector data: Making data of public entities more accessible and reusable. This will apply only to federal institutions and not to institutions of the states (Bundesländer).
2. A German Micro Data Center: Building a central custodian for socio-economic microdata held by the 40-odd research data centres (Forschungsdatenzentren, FDZ) that will be allowed to perform record linkage between data sets when requested by researchers. Requests for data linkage can be submitted for common welfare-focused research by accredited institutions, which includes private entities. Researchers will be charged with a fee for this service, but it is currently not known how high this fee will be. Assumed to be an organisationally independent unit within the Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis).
3. Harmonised data privacy rules: While this has not yet been well specified, it will likely provide additional clarification on the legitimate use of personal data for research purposes and the organisation of the competent authorities in cases of research cooperation by actors located in different states.
4. Improved findability of data sets: While the original BMBF paper contained language that implied an obligation of research institutions to maintain their own metadata catalogues, this has been walked back by BMBF in the recent month. Right now it is assumed that only a general obligation to provide metadata will be included in the FDG. Importantly, this obligation will not apply to state institutions (mainly universities) as they are by default outside of the purview of federal legislation. The FDG will not include any details on metadata standards as this is too specific for a law. Instead, the BMBF will be authorised to issue executive orders that will define these details. The BMBF has already been in contact with stakeholders, like the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), to see if and how community standards could be represented in this process.

Incremental step in the right direction

We then discussed whether the planned measures will actually help to reach the stated goals and if not, what should – or should not – be done instead. In general, the majority of participants perceived the FDG as an incremental step in the right direction, however a rather small one. Important points of criticism that could be addressed as part of the parliamentary process are:

• Participants perceived an imbalance between the new obligations that apply to all researchers, like having to submit all metadata to catalogues, and the new opportunities from which mainly researchers in socio-economic domains profit.
• Several participants voiced concerns that the scaling of the fees for Micro Data Center services might be prohibitive for smaller and less well-funded research groups.
• The split between federal and state institutions was considered to be rather problematic as it would lead to a fragmentation of research data management, especially in collaborative projects.
• The lack of a clearer commitment towards Open Research Data, as the metadata catalogues will only increase the findability of data sets, but not ease of their reuse. While it is broadly understood that there are legitimate reasons why some research data cannot be made openly available, a general Open Data obligation with a possibility to opt-out was considered to be the desired next step.
• The definition of research data – while it will apparently be close to the definition in Art. 2 (9) of the EU Open Data Directive(2019/1024) – was criticised as too focused on data from STEM fields (see also notes from the session “Open Science beyond STEM – in search for a Middle Ground”).

This text has been translated from German.

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