At the 29th meeting of the Committee for Data Access (FDI Committee) at LIfBi at the end of September, the previous chairman Dr. Daniel Fuß, head of the LIfBi Research Data Center, was re-elected for another term of three years. For the first time since the Corona pandemic, the meeting was held entirely as a face-to-face event and was organized by the FDI Coordination Office based at LIfBi.
With his re-election, Daniel Fuß continues to be both a permanent guest on the Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD) and on the steering committee of the Consortium for the Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Sciences (KonsortSWD). Tatjana Mika from the Research Data Center for Pension Insurance (FDZ-RV) was confirmed in office alongside him as the other chair.
In addition to the activity reports of the research data centers and the activities of the RatSWD, important discussion points at the 29th meeting of the FDI Committee included new legal developments surrounding the European Data Act and the European Data Governance Act, including their significance for the German research data centers. There was also an intensive exchange on how to deal with Open Data requirements for official data. Various guests were on hand in Bamberg as experts. The committee welcomed Prof. Dr. Monika Jungbauer-Gans (Hannover) and Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schneider (Wuppertal) as current chair and vice chair of the RatSWD, Dr. Bernhard Miller (Mannheim) as coordinator of KonsortSWD, and Dr. Kristina Schreiber (Cologne) as a specialist lawyer for administrative law.
The FDI Committee gathers the heads of all 42 research data centers in Germany currently accredited by the Council for Social and Economic Data (RatSWD). These meet semi-annually to coordinate cooperation in order to secure and further improve the availability of research data for the social, behavioral and economic sciences in the long term. The meetings are coordinated by the FDI Coordination Office located at LIfBi. The LIfBi Research Data Center has been a fully accredited member of the FDI Committee since 2012.
Further information on the FDI committee