Although the participating consortia cover different subject areas and research contexts (field/laboratory), the target groups addressed have much in common: They all work with biological data and use similar data types and methods.

The collaboration agreed in August 2024 aims to harmonize the research data management strategies of the three consortia for different research contexts and thus facilitate access to services and other data-related resources in the field of biology.

At the same time, the even closer cooperation as a so-called Biodata Interest Group should generate synergy effects and pool the consortia's resources in a meaningful way. Coordinated activities have been agreed in the following areas:

• Training and further education
• Service portfolio (reuse and joint development of services)
• Public relations and communication
• User support
• Activities in the UN policy arena in relation to digital sequence information.

The future Biodata Interest Group aims to initially consolidate the approaches developed with the specialist communities of the individual consortia. As the preliminary work regarding the services, guidelines, use cases and training offers complement each other very well and the consortia have already gained some experience in the implementation of joint projects, the conditions for this are ideal.

The Interest Group is open to cooperation with other specialist NFDI consortia.

DataPLANT, NFDI4Biodiversity and NFDI4Microbiota are part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) launched by the federal and state governments in 2018, which systematically opens up valuable scientific and research data for the entire German scientific system and across all disciplines, networks them and makes them usable in a sustainable and qualitative manner.

The target groups of the consortia work with similar data types, which is why the services, support and training offers developed so far complement each other perfectly.

The following data types have been a particular focus of the consortia's first funding phase to date:

The consortia will set up a Biodata Interest Group within the NFDI to steer joint activities and involve other consortia over time. The aim is to coordinate operational goals and also to carry out joint public relations work in order to reach the common target groups even better. There are also plans to cooperate across consortia in order to jointly drive forward the development of key services and guarantee the sustainable financing of biodata services.

Joint partner institutions and employees
In order to further strengthen the partnership between the three consortia, there will be joint co-applicant institutions and employees with a view to the upcoming second funding phases from 2025/2026. A list of the current partner institutions can be found in the annex to the published letter of intent.

Joint digital infrastructure
The consortia rely on cooperation with the de.NBI service centers and the cloud and have a common interest in driving the further development of the de.NBI infrastructure to meet the needs of their target communities. They will also provide new use cases to work with de.NBI to sharpen its portfolio for research data infrastructure providers in the life sciences. The latter will be facilitated by the de.NBI cloud providers that are joint members of the consortia. In addition, there is a shared interest in multicloud technologies and the concept of the Research Data Commons. This is being jointly promoted as part of the ongoing negotiations on the NFDI architecture and basic services.

Joint programming work for services and standards
The consortia will develop cross-consortium Flexfunds projects and use cases, e.g. in relation to the use of the Annotated Research Context (ARC) in biodiversity research groups, the use of the ontology repositories BiodivPortal and Bioportal as well as TS4NFDI, the joint development of tools for the collection of metrics on service use and the implementation of bioschemas.org by data and service providers in the consortia. The use cases are used to further develop services in various specialist areas and to plan cross-consortium workshops and seasonal schools.

Joint programming work for services and standards
The consortia will develop cross-consortium Flexfunds projects and use cases, e.g. in relation to the use of the Annotated Research Context (ARC) in biodiversity research groups, the use of the ontology repositories BiodivPortal and Bioportal as well as TS4NFDI, the joint development of tools for the collection of metrics on service use and the implementation of bioschemas.org by data and service providers in the consortia. The use cases are used to further develop services in various specialist areas and to plan cross-consortium workshops and seasonal schools.

The Memorandum of Understanding was signed in August 2024 and published on Zenodo:

Förstner, K., Ebert, B., Glöckner, F.-O., von Suchodoletz, D., McHardy, A. C., & Mühlhaus, T. (2024). Memorandum of Understanding between NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4Microbiota and DataPlant. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13880944

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