The collection, archiving, and dissemination of research data is a strategic prerequisite for efficient and quality assured research. Science can make an important contribution to addressing current and future challenges if the basis for evidence-based and data-driven policy advice and knowledge transfer to society is ensured. Only then can the potential of research data be fully exploited. With this in mind, the project partners have joined forces in order to further develop and network their offers and services for empirical research on racism and right-wing extremism.

In order to ensure that the provenance of research data remains traceable throughout the data life cycle, structured measures are required, which are also highly relevant for domian-specific research data infrastructures. For this reason, DP-R|EX follows the FAIR principles, which serve as a guideline for the design of sustainable, open, and tailored offers and services. High-quality data documentation and user-friendly access rules should ensure that researchers can find and re-use existing data and, where appropriate, link them to other data.

As a result, the data centres in the network are committed to making access to (publicly funded) research data as FAIR and low-threshold as possible. For data archived via DP-R|EX, the descriptions and metadata are therefore freely searchable on the Internet after publication. The network’s data centres also support the publication of metadata under Creative Commons licences. Of course, the use of published research datasets depends on the access conditions chosen by the data providers, which are adapted to the dataset, its requirements and specific conditions. First and foremost, data protection and copyright laws must be respected. The principle of intelligent openness (see The Royal Society 2012), according to which data should be made available