Publication of the Research Data Centres’ Activity Report 2022

Politics and society expect research to provide answers to how social cohesion and economic prosperity can be maintained in the face of global challenges such as climate change. In order to be able to provide answers to the most pressing societal questions, researchers are dependent on access to current data that is as comprehensive as possible. A low-threshold, data protection-compliant access to quality-assured research data is provided by the Research Data Centres (RDC) accredited by the German Data Forum (RatSWD). To date, 61,643 researchers have used the RDC data. The diverse data offered by the RDCs covers almost all research fields in the empirical social, behavioural, educational, and economic sciences. A large part of the data is available free of charge to researchers and students. In addition, the data centres offer further services such as user training and conferences. For quality assurance purposes, the RatSWD conducts an annual monitoring of the data centres and publishes the results in an activity report.