Data FAIRness is our mission

The initiation of DP-R|EX goes back to the catalogue of measures of the Cabinet Committee on Combating Right-Wing Extremism and Racism from 2020. The aims of the package of measures are to better understand these phenomena and their causes and consequences and to intensify the fight against racist discrimination, right-wing extremist attacks and group-focused enmity. As part of this, the Federal Government’s data strategy also provides for improved access to high-quality data in the field of research in accordance with the FAIR principles.

Against this background, a FAIR data infrastructure specifically for racism and right-wing extremism research (R|EX research for short) will be established as part of the project launched in autumn 2021 and funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In addition to GESIS, the Qualiservice Research Data Centre, the Research Data Centre of the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research (DeZIM.fdz) and the (Social) Media Observatory (SMO) at the Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) are also involved in the project. This cooperation has resulted in a topic-specific portal at datenportal-rechtsextremismus.de, which is not a simple research platform, but provides specific services for supporting, searching, managing and sharing research data.

The objectives of DP-R|EX as a central data infrastructure for primary researchers and data users in the research field can be summarised as follows.

THE DATA PORTAL...

makes relevant data sets and their analysis potential visible to researchers through a topic-specific data search by developing description standards adapted to the research area.
supports researchers in research data management (RDM) and data sharing in accordance with the FAIR principles, thus improving access to previously unpublished collections for subsequent use.
is the contact point for projects from the current BMBF funding lines on racism and right-wing extremism with the aim of making data accessible for secondary use and supporting the handling of data from social media and messenger services through specific RDM offers.
closes an existing data gap by providing data on hate speech and hate crime on the internet.
enables the legally compliant exchange of directories of right-wing extremist actors and networks from the internet and social media in order to prevent redundant work steps in data collection.