Promoting Change Towards more Data Literacy in Research

The scientific landscape is continually shifting towards increasing amounts of data, demanding agreater investment of (time-) resources into the management of these data. As a result, data literacyis a key element of research, which is becoming more and more important for researchers from alldomains. Additionally, interdisciplinary,multidisciplinary, and collaborative approaches arebecoming more essential now than ever before. Hence, we believe the concept and activities of theRhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy to be highly relevant to the topic and audience ofthis year’s “E-Science Tage” conference.The Rhine-Ruhr Center for Scientific Data Literacy is an initiative funded by the German Federalministry for Education and Research (BMBF) and the European Union. We are a consortium of nineinstitutions in the Rhine-Ruhr area including universities, research institutions, and universities ofapplied science. The overarching goal of the DKZ.2R is to reduce data-related hurdles in researchand support holistic, methodological data literacy in the areas of research data management,artificial intelligence,machine learning, high performance computing, and data science. TheDKZ.2R has a strong interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary focus, and is a regional center focusedprimarily, but not exclusively on partners and participants in the Rhine-Ruhr area.Our main objective is to promote a holistic methodological data literacy and offer support forresearchers to break through data related hurdles in order to find cross-domain solutions andsynergies. The regional focus of the DKZ.2R allows us to offer in-depth support, making resourcesmore generally available and facilitating connections between researchers and research groupsacross institutions and domains. With a more flexible approach such as curating relevant andexisting trainings and seminars, identifying gaps in those resources, and creating new offers in theform of (online) courses and seminars, we aim at supporting data literacy for researchers from allover Germany while ensuring high quality in all of our offerings. This combination of in-depth andmore general long- and short-term solutions allows us to promote data literacy, research datamanagement, and machine learning skills (depending on the researcher’s needs) while constantlyadapting to the changing challenges in the scientific landscape.