In 2021, the three most active HRDA member institutions of ELKH, SZTAKI, the Centre for Social Sciences and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, received financial support from ELKH to implement a project that will create the infrastructural environment for data-driven research in ELKH institutions and actively contribute to the development and dissemination of a FAIR culture of data-driven research. On 1 November 2021, ELKH launched the ELKH Data Repository Platform (ELKH ARP) project with a total funding of around HUF 500 million.

LKH ARP Research Data Repository project aims to establish a central data repository system supporting the whole ELKH research network, providing research data repository and related, integrated data- and metadata-management services.

​Access to the data sets that underpin scientific results, making them publicly available and searchable for further research can not only promote the development of a given field of science but also open the door to interdisciplinary and international research, which is nowadays increasingly becoming a basic principle, an expectation, and sometimes a requirement. The publication and storage of data related to scientific publications is often done in an ad-hoc manner but this has a number of drawbacks.

How to build a data repository? What does a data repository need to know and how should we find out about it? What are the difficulties and how prepared are the potential users?

Within the ELKH ARP, we conducted a non-representative survey on the data management policies of the journals preferred by ELKH researchers. Neither the disciplines nor the publishers’ own practices show uniformity in the management of scientific data published in their journals. Although the long-established publishers try to follow FAIR principles, there is no uniform policy yet, and some journals do not have strict requirements for open access to cited data at all. The complexity and diversity of scientific data also makes it challenging for authors to store and make them accessible.