Source: Own Illustration
This month marks a milestone: Coscine has been in full operation for three years and is celebrating its anniversary. It’s a good opportunity to pause for a moment and take a look at how the research data management platform has evolved technically and what has happened since it went live in April 2023.
Coscine has long been more than just a project: As a central component of research data management, the platform supports researchers in their daily work and continues to evolve in response to practical needs.
Reliable Operation Meets Continuous Improvement
With the transition to regular operations in 2023, the foundation was laid for a stable, reliable service. Another sign of this consolidation was the registration of Coscine as a trademark, which clearly positions the platform beyond its purely technical operations.
At the same time, “regular operation” by no means meant standing still. Quite the contrary: Over the past three years, there has been a strong focus on consolidating existing components, providing new features, and expanding the technical foundation to make it future proof.
The platform’s clear structure and central API enable users to easily access stored research data as well as enter and search for metadata.
Modern Storage Infrastructure: A Major Step Forward
A key technical milestone was the gradual replacement of the previous Research Data Storage (RDS) with DataStorage.nrw. The integration of this state-wide, geographically redundant S3 object storage significantly expanded and standardized Coscine’s storage infrastructure.
For users, this means:
- greater reliability thanks to distributed locations,
- significantly greater available capacity, and
- a unified resource type for DH.NRW universities.
The migration of existing data was carried out in a coordinated manner and without any active effort on the part of researchers. This was a challenge that was extensive both technically and organizationally and further strengthened Coscine’s role as a central access system.
Since July 2023, a dedicated Coscine-JARDS instance has been used for submitting and reviewing storage space requests. How researchers at participating universities can submit a storage space request and which documents assist researchers and reviewers in this process have already been covered in separate blog posts.
API, Automation, and Integration Into Research Processes
A lot has also happened “under the hood.” The API, as the platform’s core component, has been continuously expanded and fundamentally enhanced with a new API version in the fall of 2023. It forms the foundation for:
- automated access to data and metadata,
- the integration of Coscine into local workflows, and
- the use of specialized clients or, for example, the Coscine Python SDK.
In this way, Coscine not only supports manual work via the web interface but increasingly also automated and reproducible research processes—an important step for modern data-driven research.
Metadata, FAIR, and Semantic Search
A key focus of further development remained in the area of metadata and FAIR digital objects. Building on existing structured metadata profiles, RDF-based data models, and validation via SHACL, targeted improvements have been implemented in recent years to further enhance the discoverability and reusability of research data.
An important step was the expansion of the PID landing page in line with FAIR Digital Objects: Additional metadata is now displayed there, allowing interested parties to gain a better initial impression of the data and, if necessary, request targeted access from the project managers.
Progress has also been made in the area of search. Semantic search makes it possible to discover data more effectively across content-related contexts, thereby improving the reuse of research data.
In addition, several features have been introduced to make using Coscine easier in day-to-day operations. These include integration with the NFDI RegApp Community AAI login, which simplifies the onboarding of new universities and consortia—14 universities have already been integrated through this process. Users can also configure topic-specific email notifications in their user profiles. In addition, a feature for requesting data publication from one of the listed publication services has been implemented.
Regular Operations Also Mean Taking Feedback Seriously
Finally, feedback from the community has played a key role. Surveys, support requests, and direct communication with users are continuously incorporated into the platform’s ongoing development, whether in terms of user guidance, new resource types, or documentation.
Regular operations provide the necessary framework for implementing improvements in a planned manner and rolling out new features incrementally.
Outlook: Ready for the Coming Years
Three years of regular operation have shown that Coscine has matured technically and is both stable and flexible. The platform has adapted to new requirements and now serves as a robust foundation for research data management at RWTH Aachen University and beyond.
Have you been using Coscine in recent years? Which features are particularly helpful to you in your day-to-day research work? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments. We’re eager to hear about your experiences!
Learn More
Don’t want to miss out on anything? Then check out the Coscine website, the IT Center blog, and the FDM blog, and subscribe to the Coscine newsletter for exciting updates, new features, and helpful tips!
Live: the Coscine user survey is open until April 30, 2026. Take this opportunity to help shape the future of the research data management platform.
Responsible for the content of this article are Hania Eid, Katja Jansen and Arlinda Ujkani.
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