Research data management is one of the most important topics a researcher has to deal with in the digital era. During his/her investigative work a lot of digital data is incurred. A good management of these should be a part of the research process to make the data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Re-usable). The role of the universities is to support their researchers in the best way by providing the right tools and services – on either the organisational and technical level. In the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) founded project “FDMentor” five universities from Berlin and Brandenburg are working together to create strategies, plans of actions, roadmaps, guidelines and open access material for an exceptional research data management infrastructure. The Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the Freie Universität Berlin, the Technische Universität Berlin, the University of Potsdam and the European University Viadrina bundle their experience to work on the four main tasks: strategy development, policy development, expertise enhancements and networking. The goal of the project is to support the educational institutions to establish a professional research data management. To achieve this, easy to re-use models and instructions for the strategy development for research data management are generated based on the know-how of the co-operation partners. A component and level based policy kit will help to create an own research data policy and guidelines will accompany the universities with the strategical implementation of it. Complementary, support and training concepts including open access training material will be provided. The objective of the collaborative work in FDMentor is to make sure that the introduction of a research data management at universities (or other educational institutions) is efficient and easy to conduct.

This work was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 16FDM010) and presented at FORCE 2017.