D-A-CH working group

Mission and goals of the working group

The aim of the WG is to intensify cooperation in German-speaking countries, to use synergies, to exchange best practices and to establish short paths of (informal) exchange. The goals are:

• The expansion of personal contacts and the establishment of closer cooperation.
• Identifying and setting common priorities
• To enable trilateral project consortia and to initiate concrete projects.
• The further development of CS in terms of content and quality in the German-speaking region
• A stronger and more uniform presence of CS in the international arena

Members

The members of the D-A-CH working group work at universities and research institutions or are otherwise active as actors in the context of citizen science. They come from the following institutions, among others:

• Österreich forscht / BOKU University
• OeAD – Zentrum für Citizen Science
• Schweiz forscht / Science et Cité
• Partizipative Wissenschaftsakademie (Universität Zürich/ ETH Zürich)
• mit:forschen! Gemeinsam Wissen schaffen (Wissenschaft im Dialog & Museum für Naturkunde Berlin)
• WWU Münster
• Friedrich-Schiller Universität Jena
• Leibniz-Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim)
• open science for open societies - os4os gUG

Contact/contact persons

Austria:
Daniel Dörler: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Florian Heigl: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Switzerland:
Tiina Stämpfli: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Olivia Höhener: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Germany:
Wiebke Brink: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Topics for 2025

The D-A-CH working group is planning the following joint activities for 2025:

• Citizen science conferences: There is potential for synergies in the national conferences held in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, which can be exploited even more. In 2025, members of the D-A-CH working group are represented in the respective other conference committees.
• Training offers: In the area of "Training", the D-A-CH working group 20253 deals with processing the knowledge gained in online open data workshops in 2023 and 2024 in the form of a guide or similar.
• The working group is currently working on submitting a contribution on the online workshops on the topic of open data to the upcoming CitSci Helvetia 2025.

Series: Open Data in Citizen Science

We kicked off our series of workshops on open data in citizen science with an introductory webinar on 3 July 2023. Hands-on workshops followed from September 2023, in which criteria, tools and best practices for open data in citizen science projects were developed for various specialist disciplines. The webinar was mandatory as an introduction for participation in the subject-specific workshops and can also be viewed here.

Webinar: Open Data in Citizen Science Projects

What does the term Open Data mean? What is the relevance of open data for citizen science? And what experiences and structures already exist in citizen science projects? In an introductory webinar, Prof. Dr Stefan Scherbaum (University of Dresden) and Dr Melanie Röthlisberger (University of Zurich) introduced the topic of open data. The event was aimed at newcomers to open data, i.e. project coordinators and interested parties from the field of citizen science who have little or no experience with open data in their projects. You can watch the webinar here.

Workshop: Open Data for the Humanities

In a hands-on workshop with speaker Dr Susanne Blumesberger, Msc. (University of Vienna), participants learned how to prepare their research data from citizen science projects for open access on the basis of test data and a data management plan.

Webinar: Digital Ethics in Citizen Science

Citizen science projects are inevitably subject to ethical considerations, especially through (or in) collaboration with people outside the research community. Many of these projects rely on digital tools for collaboration, especially when working with large numbers of citizen scientists. However, the use of these digital tools also raises specific ethical questions. What are these questions and how can they be addressed? What ethical challenges do citizen science projects face in the digital space? This was the topic of the D-A-CH-AG webinar on 27 September with expert Prof. Dr. Petra Grimm from the Stuttgart Media University.

Workshop: Open Data with Zenodo for Citizen Science

In the online workshop with Christian Erlinger and Kathrin Heim (both from the Zentral- und Universitätsbibliothek Luzern) on 14 June, project leaders who want to make their data openly available learned how the Zenodo platform works and how to prepare research data for it.

Workshop: Data submission & publication for citizen science biodiversity projects

The online workshop on November 14, 2024,, conducted by Daniel Tschink and Judith Engel of NFDI 4 Biodiversity, gave participants an insight into various discipline-specific data centres in biological and biodiversity research. They learned how to handle sensitive data and what constitutes a "good" data description. They also received a practical introduction to the GFBio Data Submission and Brokerage System: This service supports researchers in curating, archiving and publishing their datasets with the help of experts in renowned data centres for environmental, biodiversity and collections data.