Dear members and friends of the KonsortSWD community,

2025 has been a special year for KonsortSWD. In July, the Joint Science Conference (GWK) decided to continue funding KonsortSWD, paving the way for a second project phase starting in October and running until the end of 2028. This decision underlines how important a robust research data infrastructure is for the social, behavioural, educational and economic sciences – and it is very much a success that rests on your daily work in research data centres, at our partner institutions and certainly in KonsortSWD services.

At the same time, RatSWD has continued to sharpen the political and strategic profile of our community. It published a position paper with ten concrete demands for the new legislative period of the German Bundestag and updated the guideline on quality assurance and accreditation of research data centres.

There were also many bright spots in our program work. The online series “Meet-the-Data” entered its third and fourth season with a focus on educational research and financial data. In parallel, KonsortSWD expanded its support for research data management professionals: the “Agents of Change” workshops in Hannover and Jena. Our community also met many colleagues “in the wild”. In March, we were present at the annual conference of the German Health Economics Association (dggö) in Paderborn with a stand and a session on “better data for health economic research?”. Later in the year, Statistical Week 2025 in Wiesbaden, the DGS in Duisburg and the AS in Mainz – among others -  once again brought together our community. And across all disciplines, the second Conference on Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI) at RWTH Aachen at the end of August highlighted how NFDI consortia jointly advance services, standards and visions for research data in Germany.

Behind these highlights lies what makes KonsortSWD special: the decentralized network of 39 RatSWD‑accredited research data centres and partner repositories that provide cost‑effective, well‑documented sensitive data for research at an impressive scale.

Looking ahead, the second funding phase from October 2025 to 2028 will give us room to stabilise what has been built and to further develop services, standards and participation formats together. There will be many opportunities to get involved – in working groups, events, calls and, of course, in the everyday cooperation between data centres, researchers and research data management professionals. Most imminently, at our Network Meeting in Frankfurt in February.

We wish you a warm and restful holiday season and a smooth start to the new year. Thank you for everything you bring to KonsortSWD through ideas, engagement and the steady work that often remains invisible, but makes all the difference.

Warm regards,
Christof Wolf