Origin#
This document was converted from the original office document for convenience. It should contain the same information, but to be sure always refer to the original.
Meeting#
- Date: 3rd of March 2026, 9:00 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
- Place: University of Stuttgart, Vaihingen Campus, V47.05
Participants#
- Representatives of the funded projects
- Representatives of the invited guest projects
- Members of the DFG Committee on Scientific Library Services and Information Systems
- Members of DFG’s Research Software Infrastructures Committee
- Representatives of the DFG Head Office
Agenda#
- Introduction by the DFG Head Office
- Introductions of the funded projects and the invited guest projects/organisations
- Open thematic discussions
- Summary and integration
Minutes#
Introduction by the DFG head office
- Materials: Presentation by the DFG Head Office
Benedikt Wirth welcomes the participants of the network meeting and gives a short presentation on the agenda of the day. He clarifies the motivation of the network meeting and describes the goals from the perspective of the DFG, particularly the main objective of the creation of a national Gesamtstruktur for research software infrastructures. Furthermore, he briefly introduces the participants present from the side of the DFG and its committees. Finally, Benedikt Wirth asks the participants about their expectations of the meeting. The participants agree to include the topic of Openness into the open thematic discussions during the second half of the meeting.
Introductions of the funded projects and the invited guest projects/organisations
- Materials: Presentations by the individual projects
The representatives of each of the funded projects introduce their projects to the participants and answer the following questions:
- How can your project benefit from networking with the other projects?
- How can your project contribute to the creation of a national integrated structure for research software?
- What should a national integrated structure for research software be able to achieve? Finally, the invited guests introduce their projects/organisations to the participants.
Open Thematic Discussions
- Materials: None
The participants are asked to discuss six questions concerning the creation of a national “Gesamtstruktur” for research software infrastructures and to post their central discussion points on six display boards each dedicated to one question. The individual questions and the central discussion points regarding these questions are listed below:
What are the objectives for a Gesamtstruktur for research software? What should it be able to achive?
- Avoid duplication and maximise efficiency
- Achieve international integration
- Establish more collaboration with NFDI (particularly BASE4NFDI)
- Assist in bridging the gap of RSEs to domain knowledge
- Assist in bridging the gap of researchers to (R)SE
- Help scientists to develop better software
- Pool expertise in providing services
- Focus on the “R” in RSE (i.e., issues related to research & software)
- Work towards metadata compatibility
- Work towards standards harmonisation
- Work towards infrastructure harmonisation
- Integrate existing infrastructure
- Create and maintain git repositories
What are the most critical challenges on the path to a Gesamtstruktur? How could these challenges be addressed?
- Legal challenges:
- Service exchange
- Taxes
- Funding limitations (Bund vs. Länder)
- Licenses for Code and data
- Implications of scraping from journals or databases
- Communication
- Federation and International integration
- Incentives for the scientific community to contribute
- Career perspectives
- Research software as
- Visibility of RSI services
- Acceptance of RSE services (e.g., by funding agencies)
- Recognition of research software as research output
- Selection of appropriate economic models (“Gebührenordnung” for RSE)
- Research software quality (bug-free, correct, documented)
- Long-term sustainability and dependence
- Downsides of AI:
- (Dis-)Trust into the high volume of code produced by AI
- Time waste vs. time save through LLMs
- Dealing with code that no one really understands
- Assessment of quality, innovation, and excellence
- Legal challenges:
Which stakeholders should be involved in the creation of a Gesamtstruktur?
- NFDI and meta-section infrastructure
- Local (or state-wide) RSE support units/infrastructures
- Industry
- State governments or initiatives
- Scientists
- Researchers who code
- Non-researchers who code for scientists
- Scientific councils and societies
- Research libraries
- Science educators
Which aspects can be negotiated bottom-up? Where are top-down specifications necessary? Who should formulate these specifications?
- Top-down:
- Enforce integration into Gesamtstruktur (via proposal acceptance and rejection)
- Provide continuous funding
- Establish research software policies in organisations
- Establish nation-wide policies
- Demand usage of services
- Guide endorsement processes for standards
- Bottom-up:
- Defining of and agreeing on standards (e.g., for interoperability development)
- Community commitment
- Service-based funding (services that provide income)
- Lean, automated workflows (e.g., registration)
- Both routes:
- Identification of needs, gaps, and opportunities
- Set-up and maintenance of collaboration channels
- Top-down:
Which infrastructures can be established across disciplines? Where are discipline-specific structures necessary?
- Broad spectrum of RSE between discipline-specific and discipline-agnostic software engineering
- Identify aspects of discipline-specific solutions that can be generalized
- Understand the common aspects in scientific software across disciplines
- Generic software management infrastructures (github vs. sovereign offers)
- Potential conflict between domain-specific solutions and a Gesamtstruktur
- Advertisment of RSI services in “underserved” domains
How can Openness help to create a Gesamtstruktur? (Topic suggested by participants)
- Suggest Open Source by default
- Establish clear publication policies for research software
- Round tripping
- Joint events
- Publishing the software as such
- Diamond Open Access
- Red Teaming
- “Kerndatensatz Forschung”
- “Hello World” (see Item 4)
Summary and integration
- Materials: None
At the end of the meeting, Benedikt Wirth collects the most important take-away messages from the open thematic discussions. First, the “Hello World” concept is put forward. This concept suggests that each project feeds a minimal example into the infrastructure of another project to check whether the infrastructure works as intended and to see whether the output is useful for other projects. This should – in turn – lead to the projects finding areas for future collaboration and to the different projects growing together.
Another idea to foster the collaboration between projects is the concept of red teaming. The rationale of red teaming would be that the team of one project scans the output of another project for critical weaknesses regarding cybersecurity (e.g., before the publication of new stable releases). This concept could be expanded to also include project teams testing the soundness and validity of tools and infrastructures created within other projects.
Benedikt Wirth asks the projects to either nominate or elect one project to be the spokesperson “Klassensprecher” for all the funded projects. The idea would be that this Klassensprecherprojekt coordinates the communication among projects and the communication between the DFG Head Office and the funded projects. Since the project CORSES is characterised by a universal, generalised approach, the project representatives nominate CORSES as the Klassensprecherprojekt. It is further decided that the CORSES project will set-up an email list and a matrix channel for communication. To this end, the DFG Head Office will provide the CORSES project with the email addresses of all the funded projects (both PIs and employees).
Finally, it is agreed upon that the next Research Software Infrastructures Network Meeting should take place at deRSE27. Importantly, however, informal interaction between the projects should be fostered in the meantime. The collaboration workshop in Göttingen in September is pointed out as an excellent opportunity for this informal exchange.