Base4NFDI: Fostering A Cross-Disciplinary Service Landscape For The German National Research Data Infrastructure

Abstract

Base4NFDI is a joint initiative by the 26 consortia of the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), aiming to develop essential cross-disciplinary basic services that enable FAIR data practices. Through a proposal-driven, bottom-up process, Base4NFDI supports technical and organisational solutions, such as identity and access management, computing, software, and workflows that serve the NFDI community. Proposals emerge from NFDI sections, where domain and infrastructure experts collaborate across disciplines.

The role of Base4NFDI is to provide and orchestrate a multi-stakeholder process to decide which services to fund and to ensure coherence through structured development phases (Initialisation, Integration, and Ramp-Up), supported by staff who facilitate coordination and quality assurance. So far, eight candidates are under development, such as IAM4NFDI, TS4NFDI, and Jupyter4NFDI. This brief report introduces the Base4NFDI approach, outlines the decision-making and support processes, introduces current service candidates, shares early experiences and challenges, and provides an outlook on sustainability and international interoperability, particularly with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).