How can I become a Member and use the NFDI4ING services?

Question

I am professor at Ulm University and a PI in DFG GRK. I would like to become a member of NFDI4ING and use the services.

Answer 1

Dear Chri,

great to see your interest in the NFDI4ING consortium and its services.

Regarding participation within NFDI4ING, there are several forms, including becoming a Participant. Our administration office team will be glad to give you more details (publicly here in the forum, and/or you contact them via the "Get in touch" section on our homepage).

Regarding our service, we provide an overview of our service portfolio. Please check out for the specific services you are interested in: Some of them you can use directly without any registration (like the Data Collections Explorer), some are currently specific for institutions within NFDI4ING (like a provided GitLab instance), and some can be used simply via DFN-AAI or SSO for universities in Germany (like the RDMO instance). 

Best regards

Mario

Answer 2

Hi Chri,

to clarify Mario's answer a bit: you don't have to be a formal member of the consortium to use our services. There are a few exceptions where membership of your home institution may be required for access and identity management (i.e. through the DFN or NFDI-AAI) or because the potential costs of the service provided cannot be covered through project funds alone (say, because it requires large amounts of storage or computing time), but generally there are no restrictions.

However, if you are looking to be more directly involved, there are multiple ways. Going from least "bureaucratic" overhead to most:

- You can always take part in one of our Community Meetings, Special Interest Groups, or our annual conference. All NFDI4ING events except for our annual all-hands project meeting are open to everyone interested and usually free-of-charge. (And even for our all-hands meeting we are always happy to discuss participation to integrate new viewpoints or communities). Upcoming events will always be posted on our website here: Link. The next Community Meeting will be on April 29th (online), our conference is scheduled for September 15th/16th (in-person, Darmstadt). If you want to know more about these formats, feel free to send an e-mail with your questions to contact@nfdi4ing.de (or ask them here :) ).

- If you are looking for contacts for research collaborations or to answer specific RDM questions, we can connect you to the right person. Just sent a short info with a bit more details to contact@nfdi4ing.de. 

- Since your home institution Uni Ulm is part of the NFDI e.V., we can invite you to the NFDI's Rocket.Chat instance, which provides a low-threshold channel to members of NFDI4ING, the NFDI e.V. directorate and members of all other funded consortia (https://all-chat.nfdi.de). We would need your e-mail address to send you an invitation, if you're interested.

- From 2020 to 2024 we had a Seed Fund Programme running that offered funding for small-ish projects (up to 66.300€ and max. duration 1 year) that fit our work programme or expanded our community. If NFDI4ING receives further funding after September 2025, there might be a new call sometime in Winter 2025 or Spring 2026. Institutions funded through the programme (have to) become participants (to legally receive funds).

- If you want to formalise membership, we (and the DFG) would need a Letter of Commitment outlining what you or your home institution would contribute to NFDI4ING. The process is somewhat involved and I won't go into more detail here. If you want to learn more about the next steps, best contact us via e-mail.

Best regards,

Thorsten (member of the NFDI4ING administrative office)