While the institutional introduction of infrastructure for the collection and conservation of primary scientific data is currently under construction or already exists, a parallel problem awareness arises for the associated models and methods, in particular for data evaluation. However, there is hardly any usable infrastructure and service offerings yet. Although the DFG recommendations on "good scientific practice" currently only recommend the retention of primary scientific data, the remainder of the recommendation refers to mandatory records of "materials and methods" that are not only necessary for comprehensible results but also for the publication process.
If scientific results are to be reproducible, for example for an independent verification, a reconstruction of the experimental setup is necessary. However, in the digital age, with its extremely short life span (and availability) of hardware and software components, replicating a data processing process that is identical in all components can not be achieved solely on the basis of records.
CiTAR (Citing and Archiving Research), a three-year Baden-Württemberg state project, develops infrastructure to support computer assisted research. One major outcome of this project are means to publish, cite and provide long-term access to virtual research environments.
The aim of this project is to develop a cooperative, multidisciplinary technical-organizational service in order to support teaching and research in the further development of "good scientific practice".
The service should provide data and scientific methods jointly citable and reproducibly in order to meet the requirements of modern journals. CiTAR realizes re-use of research data and long-term availability in terms of a modern research data management. To achieve the project objectives, three of the four bwFor HPC operators have joined forces to prototype a broader scope in the natural sciences, especially the computational and data-intensive scientific disciplines.
The developed service provides automated import of virtual machines and popular container formats like Docker and Singularity. CiTAR assigns persistent identifiers to the imported research environments and provides ressources to re-run the archived objects with external data
