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2nd Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B 2025) – Uniting the community, users and services

Visual UC4B group

2025-09-10

The second Base4NFDI User Conference was held on 28-29 August in Aachen in combination with the CoRDI 2025 conference. Part plenary, part hands-on, the event signaled a marked shift in the maturity of the services and focused on their sustainability and future users. Below are some highlights.

The Future of Digital Research Infrastructure in Australia

Day 1 of the conference kicked-off with an inspirational keynote from Rosie Hicks, CEO of the Australian Research Data Commons, which focused on the challenges and opportunities facing digital research infrastructures, especially in terms of ensuring data sovereignty at the national level, validating research quality, and leveraging AI across services. Rosie advocated for prioritising widely-used services, warning against focusing on "catwalk" or showcase solutions that receive more attention than actual user adoption justifies. She called for sustained “respect” for infrastructure and summarised ongoing sectoral challenges: availability of resources, the need for endurance, and developing the necessary knowledge and skills within organisations.

Australia’s approach centers on public sector investment in infrastructures that are innovative, trusted, and collaborative. A potential inspiration for NFDI.

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Credit: Markus Getto, NFDI Office

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Credit: Melina Jander, Base4NFDI Office

A Real-Life “User” Perspective

Sustainable infrastructure services require more than just technical solutions. They also require a community to adopt them. Sandra Zänkert and Martin Reinhardt from the Base4NFDI team took the audience on a user journey to show how the current services can be used in the framework of a research project. They demonstrated how to foster acceptance and active use, as well as permanent institutional anchoring, based on comprehensible use cases.

In Lars Bernard’s welcome address he also stressed that two recent and influential policy papers (RfII and Wissenschaftsrat) view Base4NFDI as a role-model, emphasising basic, cross-consortial services as a foundation for sustainability.

A key highlight was the International Panel ​about "How to build sustainable infrastructures - lessons learnt and future perspectives" - A summary on that will follow soon!

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Credit: Eva-Lotte Rother, Base4NFDI

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Credit: Melina Jander, Base4NFDI Office

Service Integration – Lessons Learned from Early Adopters

Day 2 featured practical experiences from several consortia who have already implemented basic services:

  • IAM4NFDI (NFDI4Culture): Torsten Schrade shared that early stakeholder engagement—particularly in policy, before technical, development—would have streamlined integration. The next focus is on integrating DMP4NFDI.
  • TS4NFDI (RADAR - NFDI4Chem, NFDI4Culture, NFDI4Memory): Sergio Pollo-Vazquez introduced the autocomplete feature and answered questions about RADAR’s flexible repository hosting.
  • DMP4NFDI (NFDI4Chem): Fabian Fink described DMP template development based on DFG checklists and integration into RDMO. The service already supports over 130 projects and is being continuously upgraded, including feedback features for user-driven improvement.

Discussions underscored the value of proactive stakeholder involvement, iterative improvement, and clear feedback channels during integration and roll-out of new basic services.

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Credit: Franziska Fritzsche, Base4NFDI Office

Integrating with EOSC: Challenges and Best Practices

A keynote on the EOSC Federation by Philipp Wieder looked at how NFDI basic services can join the European Open Science Cloud. Some clear take-away’s for the Base4NFDI services:

  • Services should ensure compatibility with authentication systems like IAM4NFDI.
  • Implement monitoring and accounting aligned with IT service management (ITSM) processes.
  • Prepare for complex legal discussions, leveraging existing models when possible.
  • Understand the long-term vision—joining the federation aims to save administrative resources and enable more robust, collaborative solutions.

The Base4NFDI services are now in a robust state to engage users and this was clearly demonstrated in the parallel sessions which focused on hands-on implementation so far of the Base4NFDI services - a chance to get audience feedback and live input. Quests, User Experiences, Let’s talk Outreach were just some of the themes. Many thanks to the services for organising such interactive sessions and ‘food for thought’ for their future service development.

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Credit: Franziska Fritzsche, Base4NFDI Office

Key Take-Away’s from our successful second User Conference:

  • Get started in identifying what parts of a service can be operationalised as soon as possible
  • Proceed pragmatically: national service teams must anticipate federation needs, foster cooperation, and communicate value clearly and transparently
  • Start early on with the legal frameworks for both national and international alignment
  • Restructured governance to strengthen alignment between strategic, operational, and innovative arms of the association and don’t forget the people

All presentations will be uploaded in our Zenodo Community Base4NFDI User Conference 2025 (UC4B2025).

Stay tuned and thank you to all who participated, in particular our hosts at RWTH Aachen and the CoRDI organisers.

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Credit: Marcus Hardt, IAM4NFDI

Evaluation of Base4NFDI - Final Report

evaluation report

2025-09-01

Base4NFDI was evaluated by the Technopolis Group in the first half of the year. Given that the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat) also emphasises the role of basic services in its structural evaluation, we are pleased to announce that the results of the Base4NFDI process evaluation are now available.

Given the complexity of the project, but also the novelty of the framework, Base4NFDI has committed in its project proposal to an external evaluation of its decision-making and working processes after two years. The evaluation aimed to assess the progress and outcomes of the initiative to date, identify areas for improvement and ensure that the infrastructure continues to support the research community effectively. Three aspects were explored: the efficiency of the project structure and internal organisation; the relevance and coherence of the process for developing a Basic Service; and the relevance of the project for the community.

We would like to express our sincere thanks to those of you who participated in the discussions with Technopolis and took part in the surveys. The final report is published on Zenodo as well as the short presentation of the results during CoRDI 2025 by Technopolis.

How does Base4NFDI plan to proceed with the results of the evaluation?

The evaluation has shown that Base4NFDI is largely successful in fulfilling its tasks; nevertheless, potential areas for improvement have been identified, which we will discuss internally in the coming weeks with a view to implementing them by the end of the year.

We will be happy to keep you informed about this. You can find more information here.

If you have any questions, contact the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

7th Base4NFDI Newsletter - August 2025

Newsletter august

2025-08-05

Welcome to the 7th Base4NFDI newsletter!
Every two months we will share the latest updates about upcoming Base-relevant events and presentations, insights into the basic service development, and notify you about interesting resources to keep you informed and inspired.
Thank you for being a part of our community, and happy reading!

Brief updates from the basic services

  • PID4NFDI
    • PID4NFDI invites you to participate in its Metadata & PID Workflows workshop, which is a joint event for ELN and DMP tools. The workshop will take place from 22 to 23 September (lunch to lunch) in Berlin. Visit the event page to register and be part of this vital conversation. Registration will close on September 10, 2025. The workshop is limited to 20 people.
    • PID4NFDI has established PID Open Hours (bi-monthly) and a flexible Consultation Hour format.
    • PID4NFDI has published a first collection of training material.
    • The service has developed an MVP for a federated query on PIDs for instruments. This MVP will be presented at the UC4B.
    • The service is currently developing a PID Selection Tool that will be also presented at the UC4B in Aachen.
  • KGI4NFDI
    • The KGI4NFDI team is preparing the report for the conclusion of the Initialisation Phase. The service will be in hibernation until the decision for Phase II Integration is taken in January 2026.
  • Jupyter4NFDI
    • The basic service proposal from Jupyter4NFDI has been accepted for funding of the Integration Phase following the Consortia Assembly’s decision. The Integration phase will start in October 2025.
    • New data mounting feature to integrate external storages and de.NBI cloud resources have been connected. With the de.NBI Cloud, an external resource provider has been fully integrated into Jupyter4NFDI for the first time. Check the available flavors (resource configurations) here.
    • Jupyter4NFDI has implemented a new feature making it easy to collaborate live in your JupyterLab environment. With the Real-Time Collaboration (RTC) feature, multiple users can edit notebooks, run code, and explore data together — all in the same session.
  • nfdi.software
    • nfdi.software has organised an onboarding workshop to integrate the first NFDI consortia into the nfdi.software registry.
    • Descriptive review of already existing solutions, plans and policies regarding software marketplaces in NFDI consortia were published on Zenodo.
    • The survey for need and current implementation in NFDI was finished
    • nfdi.software has submitted an Integration proposal on July 30.
  • RDMTraining4NFDI
    • RDMT4NFDI has submitted an Integration proposal on July 30.
    • RDMT4NFDI has conducted a survey as part of their requirements analysis in June and is now analysing the results.

Meet us

Publications and related materials

  • In May 2025, we invited our community and everyone interested to the 2nd Base4NFDI Services Roadshow. The Q&A, videos and slides are now published on the event page.

Miscellaneous

  • News about the upcoming Base4NFDI User Conference (UC4B 2025) directly after CoRDI 2025 in Aachen.
    • Registration deadline is extended until August 7.
    • Highlights are the keynote with Rosie Hicks (CEO of ARDC) about her insights and vision on "The Future of Digital Research Infrastructure in Australia". And the panel discussion with a group of renowned international experts, including – besides Rosie Hicks – Carole Goble (Joint Head of Node ELIXIR-UK), Hilary Hanahoe (Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance (RDA)) and Mark van de Sanden (Senior Manager at GÉANT).
    • Target groups: Everybody interested in Base4NFDI (August 28); IT experts and affine members from all consortia (August 29).
    • The conference is free of charge and only few seats available.

If you have any questions, please contact: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Base4NFDI Services and EOSC/International Interoperability

EOSC

2025-08-04

International interoperability and engagement with EOSC is one of the key objectives of Base4NFDI. Base4NFDI services are encouraged to take a broad
approach and align with international and EOSC activities.

What is expected of Base4NFDI services during the Initialization Phase?

Focus here is primarily on developing and prototyping basic services, however service teams should also develop a basic awareness of EOSC activities and similar service developments in the European and international context, such as relevant RDA groups.

Technical interoperability aspects should be taken into account with the services/components or prototypes, for example:

  • Use of open APIs and licenses should be chosen,
  • Code should be made available as open source,
  • Documentation should be made available early on.

These generic interoperability activities will assist potential later integration to EOSC or international alignment. Please note: EOSC-awareness may shape plans for a basic service and incorporate EOSC interoperability into the plan for the Integration Phase which needs to be prepared during the Initialisation Phase.

What is expected of Base4NFDI services during the Integration Phase?

Services should take steps to be interoperable with EOSC developments mainly at the organisational level; however, some technical interoperability steps can be developed.

Organisational Interoperability

  • Service teams should extend their focus on EOSC activities and identify European initiatives which might be or become relevant for their service. If sensible and promising, they should prioritise activities and initiate networking and discussions.
  • Awareness of or reference to relevant RDA-endorsed recommendations, standards, and guidelines. Note that conversations in the service-relevant NFDI section will also provide the context.

Technical Interoperability

  • Base4NFDI will support service efforts to become interoperable with developments at the EOSC level and suggests two actions:
    1. Base4NFDI has compiled a minimal set of service attributes required for the upcoming NFDI service portfolio. Fulfilment will automatically ensure a basic interoperability with EOSC, in line with the “Guidelines for onboarding resources to EOSC”.
    2. Base4NFDI service teams are invited to join an internal ‘EOSC Connectivity meeting’, facilitated by Base4NFDI. The outcome will be a ‘checklist for EOSC interoperability’and a plan for the Integration stage for each service, which will be supported by the Base4NFDI service stewards.

More information: see our EOSC page here.

On-site Metadata & PID Workflows Workshop, hosted by PID4NFDI

PID workshop

2025-07-23

Unlock the Future of Research Data! Join the Metadata & PID Workflows Workshop, hosted by PID4NFDI!

Get ready to dive deep into the world of Metadata & PID Workflows at our Joint Workshop for ELN and DMP Tools! This is your chance to collaboratively explore how to set up DMP and ELN tool to support Metadata & PID Workflows.

This workshop brings together ELN and DMP tool developers, metadata specialists, and key stakeholders from NFDI consortia to:

  • Validate and Extend the Metadata Framework.
  • Align on PID Integration Use Cases.
  • Define Metadata Completeness & Quality.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is tailor-made for:

  • Developers and technical architects of ELN and DMP tools.
  • Metadata and interoperability experts from NFDI consortia.
  • Representatives from incubator projects focused on ELN/DMP integration.

Event Details at a Glance:

  • Date: September 22-23, 2025 (lunch to lunch)!
  • Location: Helmholtz Association Headquarter, Anna-Louisa-Karsch-Straße 2, 10178 Berlin.
  • Host: PID4NFDI
  • Limited Spots: To ensure an interactive and productive environment, the workshop is limited to 20 people.
  • Registration is open now! Don't miss out on this unique opportunity. Registration will close on September 10, 2025, or once all places have been taken, whichever comes first.

Visit their event page to register and be part of this vital conversation.