08/07/2019 | The Leibniz Association has recommended ten projects with an annual financial volume of around nine million euros as "small strategic extensions of institutes" to the Joint Science Conference of the Federal Government and the Länder (GWK) for funding from the 2020 financial year. Depending on a positive decision by the GWK in December 2019 during the budget preparation process, the projects applied for can be successively implemented from 2020.
For Leibniz President Matthias Kleiner, this is an important step into the future: "Digitisation is not a threatening horror scenario, but offers a multitude of new technical possibilities that we can and must responsibly shape for the benefit of science and society. Under this aspect, I expect the new projects to provide a noticeable innovation boost for the individual Leibniz Institutes and for their networks."
The projects applied for in detail (listed alphabetically):
Academy for Spatial Research and Planning - Leibniz-Forum für Raumwissenschaften (ARL), Hannover:
As part of its strategy for internationalisation at the European level, the Institute is creating a virtual, interactive knowledge platform that will process integrative spatial development approaches from Germany and other European countries in the Open Access process.
German Maritime Museum - Leibniz Institute for Maritime History (DSM), Bremerhaven:
Within the framework of a digital research and communication infrastructure, the museum is establishing a new working area for the implementation of its digitisation projects, which includes the digitisation of collections as well as virtual research and teaching environments in cooperation with the University of Bremen.
FIZ Karlsruhe - Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure (FIZ Karlsruhe), Karlsruhe:
The institute converts its paid mathematical information service zbMATH for literature, research data and formulas into an Open Access platform.
Georg Eckert Institute - Leibniz Institute for International Textbook Research (GEI), Braunschweig:
With the Global Textbook Resource Center, the institute is building a digital research infrastructure for textbooks and educational media that centrally consolidates, standardizes and makes available educational media resources scattered around the world.
IUF - Leibniz Institute for Environmental Medicine Research (IUF), Düsseldorf:
The technology platform developed by the institute for computer-aided exposure assessment will in future use simulations to research the relationship between air pollution and the health of the population with greater precision.
Leibniz Centre for Marine Tropical Research (ZMT), Bremen:
The institute will establish a research data infrastructure for the integration of heterogeneous research data from tropical coastal regions. In this way, social science and marine science data will be systematically linked for the first time worldwide.
Leibniz Institute for Spatial Social Research (IRS), Erkner:
The Institute is expanding the digital infrastructure of its scientific collections on the architectural history of East Germany after 1945. The collections can be searched in an integrated way and the existing databases are linked together.
Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media (IWM), Tübingen:
The Institute expands its research spectrum to include the field of "Data Science for Knowledge Media" and thus opens up the potential of Data Science for the analysis of human information processing, for example in the observation of behaviour patterns or neuronal activities in learning contexts.
Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB):
The project "Social Challenges in Times of Digitisation" anchors research on the effects of digitisation on society as a cross-sectional topic in the existing research priorities of the WZB. At the same time, the project promotes the development of social science methods, for example with regard to the extraction of data from the Internet (web scraping).
ZPID - Leibniz Centre for Psychological Information and Documentation (ZPID), Trier:
The institute will continue to develop strategically as an open science institution providing quality-assured services throughout the entire cycle of empirical research.
Leibniz digital
The Leibniz Association has launched the "Leibniz digital" initiative to explore new cooperation and funding opportunities for cooperative research in the field of digital change. In various agile workshop reports, experts from Leibniz institutes devote themselves to the subject areas of "Citizenship. New opportunities for education and research", "Expert knowledge for all. Focus Topics in the Digital Age", "Automated Knowledge Acquisition. Creating machine-interpretable research data", "Agriculture 4.0. Opportunities and risks for sustainable agriculture" and "Knowledge society. Digital opportunities for regional development".
Further information can be found at www.leibniz-gemeinschaft.de/leibnizdigital/
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