NFDI (Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, National Research Data Infrastructure) is Germany’s nationwide, community-governed programme for building shared, discipline-spanning research data infrastructure. Rather than a single database or platform, NFDI is a federation of subject-specific consortia, funded jointly by German federal and state (Länder) governments through the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), that develops standards, services, and training so research data across the sciences and humanities can be found, accessed, and reused. This guide explains how NFDI is structured, how it is governed and funded, what its consortia actually do, and how it connects to the wider European and international research-data-management landscape.
What NFDI is
NFDI’s stated vision, as set out on its own site, is “data as a common good for excellent research, organised by the scientific community in Germany.” In practice this means NFDI does not centralize research data itself. Instead, it coordinates a network of discipline-based consortia, each made up of universities, non-university research institutions, infrastructure providers, and learned societies, that build the repositories, metadata standards, vocabularies, training programmes, and cross-cutting services their own research communities need to manage data according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
The legal and administrative home of the initiative is NFDI e.V., a registered non-profit association based in Karlsruhe, established in October 2020 to serve as the coordinating body for the consortia once DFG funding decisions began. Today NFDI e.V. counts more than 300 member institutions — universities, research organizations, libraries, and scientific societies — making it one of the larger community-governed research infrastructure bodies in Germany.
How NFDI is funded and governed
NFDI consortia are funded jointly by the German federal government and the state governments, with funds administered and the peer-review selection process run by the DFG, Germany’s main research funding agency. Consortia are selected competitively in funding rounds: an applicant consortium submits a proposal describing the research community it serves, the specific data-infrastructure gap it will fill, and its planned services, and DFG’s review panels assess it alongside other domain proposals in that round.
Government funders confirmed continued support for the initiative going into its second phase, approving roughly €71 million through 2028 for consortia funded in that round, with a further commitment of up to €98.7 million annually from 2029 through 2038 once the full network is established. This multi-year, multi-decade funding horizon is unusual for a research infrastructure programme and reflects NFDI’s design as long-term national infrastructure rather than a fixed-term project.
Governance runs through five bodies: a General Assembly of member institutions, a Board of Trustees, a Scientific Senate that advises on research-community priorities, a Consortia Assembly where the funded consortia coordinate with one another, and an operational Directorate. This structure is deliberately community-led: individual consortia retain their own leadership and disciplinary focus, while NFDI e.V. handles cross-cutting coordination, shared infrastructure, and representation of Germany’s research-data interests internationally.
The consortia: how NFDI is organized by discipline
The core of NFDI is its set of subject-specific consortia, each addressing the data practices of a defined research community. As of the current funding rounds, NFDI comprises 26 funded consortia grouped loosely across four broad domains, plus Base4NFDI, a dedicated programme that develops and rolls out shared “basic services” (identity and access management, persistent identifiers, terminology services, and similar cross-cutting infrastructure) so individual consortia don’t each have to build the same plumbing independently.
- Humanities and social sciences (6 consortia): BERD@NFDI (business, economic and related data), KonsortSWD (survey and social-science data), NFDI4Culture (research on cultural heritage), NFDI4Memory (historical scholarship), NFDI4Objects (archaeology and material-culture research), and Text+ (language and text-based research data).
- Engineering sciences (5 consortia): NFDI4DataScience, NFDI4Energy, NFDI4Ing (engineering sciences), NFDI-MatWerk (materials science and engineering), and NFDIxCS (computer science).
- Life sciences (8 consortia): DataPLANT (plant sciences), FAIRagro (agricultural and agrosystem research), GHGA (German Human Genome-Phenome Archive, human genomics), NFDI4Biodiversity, NFDI4BIOIMAGE (bioimaging data), NFDI4Health (personal health data), NFDI4Immuno (immunology), and NFDI4Microbiota.
- Natural sciences (7 consortia): DAPHNE4NFDI (Earth-system and environmental sciences), FAIRmat (condensed-matter and materials physics), MaRDI (mathematical research data), NFDI4Cat (catalysis research), NFDI4Chem (chemistry), NFDI4Earth (Earth-system sciences broadly), and PUNCH4NFDI (particle, astro-, nuclear, and hadron physics).
Each consortium is itself a multi-institution project with its own principal investigators, task areas, and deliverables, typically spanning discipline-specific repositories and metadata schemas, terminology and ontology work, training curricula for researchers and data stewards, and connectors to existing international databases in that field.
How NFDI fits the broader RDM landscape
NFDI is Germany’s answer to a pattern seen across several research-intensive countries: a nationally funded, sector-specific research-data infrastructure sitting alongside (not replacing) individual institutional repositories. It sits in the same category as the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the UK Data Service, France’s Recherche Data Gouv, and Canada’s DRI Alliance — each is research-council-funded and scoped to the research sector specifically, distinct from broader public-sector data initiatives such as the UK’s National Data Library. See CASRAI’s national data infrastructure entry for how these national programmes compare as a category.
Internationally, NFDI represents Germany’s mandated national contribution to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the EU-wide effort to federate research data services across member states, and NFDI e.V. is also a member of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), the international body that develops cross-border data infrastructure standards and recommendations. Several NFDI consortia additionally participate in discipline-specific international federations relevant to their field — for example, life-science consortia coordinating with global genomics and biodiversity data networks, and chemistry/materials consortia aligning metadata work with international standards bodies.
What NFDI means for research administrators and data stewards
For institutions and researchers based in Germany, NFDI consortia are typically the first point of contact for discipline-specific data management guidance: consortium websites publish metadata standards, recommended repositories, and training materials tailored to a given field, which is often more directly actionable than generic RDM guidance. For research administrators outside Germany, NFDI is instructive as a working example of how a large research system has chosen to organize national data infrastructure funding around research communities rather than around a single centralized platform — a design choice with direct implications for anyone drafting a data management plan that needs to reference a discipline-appropriate repository or interoperate with EOSC.
Researchers depositing data with an NFDI consortium’s repository, or citing NFDI-developed standards in a DMP, should check the specific consortium’s own documentation for current service offerings, since consortia are at different maturity stages and roll out services on their own timelines within the shared NFDI framework.
Frequently asked questions
What does NFDI stand for?
NFDI stands for Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur, German for National Research Data Infrastructure.
Is NFDI a single database or repository?
No. NFDI is a federation of 26 funded, discipline-specific consortia plus Base4NFDI shared services, coordinated by the non-profit association NFDI e.V. Each consortium builds and operates its own repositories and standards for its research community; there is no single central NFDI database.
Who funds NFDI?
NFDI consortia are funded jointly by Germany’s federal government and state (Länder) governments, with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) administering funds and running the competitive selection process.
How does NFDI relate to EOSC?
NFDI e.V. is Germany’s mandated representative in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the EU’s effort to federate research data infrastructure across member states, and coordinates Germany’s contribution to that broader European effort.
How many NFDI consortia are there?
As of the current funding rounds there are 26 funded consortia spanning humanities/social sciences, engineering, life sciences, and natural sciences, plus Base4NFDI, which develops shared basic services used across consortia.
Is NFDI only for researchers in Germany?
NFDI consortia are funded to serve German research communities and are based at German institutions, but many of their outputs — metadata standards, ontologies, training materials, and repositories — are openly published and usable by researchers internationally, and several consortia coordinate directly with international disciplinary and EOSC-level infrastructure.
