The Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) is providing the DFG with additional funding to enhance the resilience of data infrastructures. These funds can be used until the end of 2027 to support subject-specific projects aimed at preserving or restoring access to data held in repositories abroad that are of key importance to research in Germany and Europe, should the availability or integrity of these datasets be at risk.

This includes support for measures such as acquiring storage capacity, providing staff resources for indexing, the curation and discipline-specific aggregation of data, integrating secured datasets into supra-regional and European structures, and carrying out legal assessments. Funding may also be provided for the development of frameworks and technologies that enable the inclusion of relevant repositories and infrastructures in cross-regional or European networks. 
 

Funding proposals for 2026 and 2027 may be submitted at any time.

The first four projects under the funding initiative for securing endangered data repositories and promoting data resilience have already been approved:

The project PANGAEA past and future efforts in rescuing data and creating resilience(externer Link) aims to systematically continue the measures already undertaken by the Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) to safeguard endangered datasets. To this end, a structure will be established so as to be able to identify risks to existing datasets through a form of scouting and, where necessary, to secure relevant datasets in the fields of environmental research and geosciences within PANGAEA. This scouting is carried out in close coordination with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States, which currently holds many of the datasets. NOAA explicitly drew attention to the fact that these datasets are subject to risks. The scouting will also contribute to coordinating activities to secure endangered data repositories across Europe.

The project “Establishing a fully independent mirror of the UCSC Genome Browser in Germany” aims to create a mirror of the UCSC Genome Browser. This means that all data currently available via the UCSC Genome Browser will in future also be hosted on servers in Germany and integrated into the German bioinformatics infrastructure. The partners in Freiburg and the United States are able to build on a long-standing collaboration, so technical support for mirroring the data and the application itself is assured. Via an interactive web platform, the UCSC Genome Browser enables users to visualise and explore different aspects of human genetic and genomic data, so it is an indispensable tool for researchers worldwide. 

Working closely with Safeguarding Research and Culture (SRC) and the Data Rescue Project (DRP), the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology in Hannover – aims to develop a decentralised, federated system for the long-term archiving of at-risk datasets. In the longer term, Project SHIELD: Science & Heritage Infrastructure for Enduring Long-term Data(externer Link) will secure high-volume datasets from US agencies that are relevant not only to engineering and technology but also to environmental sciences. These agencies are currently facing substantial budget cuts.

The project Securing and Preserving Energy Data from the Harvard Dataverse(externer Link) focuses on safeguarding datasets for energy research: these are to be made accessible again via the Open Energy Platform in cooperation with the NFDI consortium NFDI4Energy. At present, the data is hosted in the Harvard Dataverse, whose terms of use state that access may be interrupted at any time without further justification. For this reason, a metadata schema has been developed to enable the transfer of the data to the Open Energy Platform. 

Further information

• Guidelines: Funding initiative to secure endangered data repositories(Download)
• Proposal Preparation Instructions(Download)