Research Data in the Fraunhofer Digital Project. Creating a FAIR Research Data Infrastructure and Culture

The Fraunhofer Society, as the leading organization for applied research in Europe, conducts its research activities by 72 institutes and research units at locations throughout Germany. The Fraunhofer Digital project, a part of the Fraunhofer 2022 Agenda, introduces the vision, that research and administrative data will be linked, aggregated and analyzed in order to optimize the research and development processes and support management decisions. As a part of this vision, the Research Data in the Fraunhofer Data Space project develops methods to reuse the research data in a broader sense, and integrate research data silos in various institutes into Fraunhofer Data Space. In this work we present the concept, early outcomes, and a FAIRness assessment of the research data repository approach. In our assessment we used the FAIR metrics, and as a result developed a set of recommendations. These recommendations will be utilized to establish a digital research data infrastructure as well as a research data reuse culture in Fraunhofer. They can be also useful for other large scale institutions with heterogeneous research communities.