Fast-Track to Research Data Management in Experimental Material Science–Setting the Ground for Research Group Level Materials Digitalization

Research data management is a major necessity for the digital transformation in material science. Material science is multifaceted and experimental data, especially, is highly diverse. We demonstrate an adjustable approach to a group level data management based on a customizable document management software. Our solution is to continuously transform data management workflows from generalized to specialized data management. We start up fast with a relatively unregulated base setting and adapt continuously over the period of use to transform more and more data procedures into specialized data management workflows. By continuous adaptation and integration of analysis workflows and metadata schemes, the amount and the quality of the data improves. As an example of this process, in a period of 36 months, data on over 1800 samples, mainly materials libraries with hundreds of individual samples, were collected. The research data management system now contains over 1700 deposition processes and more than 4000 characterization documents. From initially mainly user-defined data input, an increased number of specialized data processing workflows was developed allowing the collection of more specialized, quality-assured data sets.