Target Group: Scientific Community

By providing the necessary infrastructure for archiving, publishing, disseminating, and making accessible research data, RADAR serves the scientific community in general. Research data published with RADAR can be found by third parties and subsequently used and cited in accordance with the license conditions.

The FAIR Principles are currently given particular importance in the research community. The FAIR Principles define measures to make research data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. Many players in science policy, including research funders, support the call for FAIR Data. The goal should be to ensure that research data is optimally prepared and accessible for both humans and machines, and that existing databases can be reused to answer new research questions - if technical and legal conditions allow.

This is particularly important in light of the establishment of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), a funding program launched by the federal and state governments in 2019 that aims to systematically make accessible scientific data that is currently often stored in a decentralized, project-based and temporary manner. As a digital, regionally distributed and networked repository of knowledge, the NFDI is intended to sustainably secure research data and make it usable as raw material for future research approaches. RADAR is already planned as a generic infrastructure component for several NFDI consortia.

RADAR, too, supports the FAIR principles and strives to implement them.

Findability

• The RADAR software supports the standardized description of files, directories and datasets with metadata. The metadata are available as validated XML.
• The RADAR Metadata Schema defines 10 mandatory fields and 13 optional fields to document the context and generation of the research data.
• Each dataset published in RADAR receives a DOI and is automatically registered with DataCite. This makes it uniquely and permanently identifiable and citable and it can be linked to a scientific publication.
• The metadata of published research data are automatically indexed at DataCite, Google and B2FIND (EUDAT) and offered for harvesting via standardized interface protocols (OAI-PMH). This promotes the dissemination and findability of the research output.

Accessability

• Research data can be made accessible to others via the RADAR data publication service.
• Authorized persons can also grant single registered users access to archived datasets.
• Research data can be linked to other resources via persistent identifiers.

Interoperability

• The RADAR Metadata Schema is based on the DataCite Metadata Schema 4.4 and thus ensures interoperability with other data sources.
• The metadata schema provides a combination of entries via controlled vocabularies and free text fields. This supports the interoperability of heterogeneous data sets without restricting the specification of discipline-specific features.
• DOIs can be used to link published datasets with other sources.
• RADAR landing pages are optimised according to the signposting approach, thereby supporting machine readability and actionability.

Reusability

• Each dataset stored in RADAR must be assigned a license (e.g. Creative Commons 4.0). This allows data providers to define the terms of use for research data.
• The RADAR Metadata Schema provides information on the origin and context of the research data. This enables potential reusers to better understand the research data and assess its reusability.