Digitalisation: Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony (NAWG)

The 'Digital Edition of the Coptic Old Testament' is one of the Academy’s long-term projects focused on making textural corpora digitally accessible and searchable.

The Academy was quick to recognise the digital transformation in the humanities and has frequently played a pioneering role in this field. Several of its research projects have been internationally trailblazing in the development of online databases. Since 2022, the ‘Göttingen Digital Academy’ has served as a forum for exploring ways of making research data as widely accessible as possible in digital form, while also ensuring its long-term preservation.

In close collaboration with the Lower Saxony State and University Library (SUB), the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung Göttingen (GWDG), and the other German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, the Academy continues to develop innovative solutions tailored to the specific requirements of its research initiatives.

A further key objective is the integration of these efforts into the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI). As early as 2010, the Academy launched its own DINI-certified digital library via the ‘res doctae’ document server. This platform provides Academy members, as well as the wider community of researchers involved in its commissions and projects, with the organisational and technical framework needed for the electronic publication of academic documents.

Göttingen Digital Academy

Since 2022, the state of Lower Saxony has been funding a project at the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony that promotes sustainable digitalisation in its long-term humanities projects. The ‘Göttingen Digital Academy' aims to link these projects to the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI).

The ‘Göttingen Digital Academy’ was founded in 2020 as part of the ‘FAIR & Co.’ workshop organised by the eHumanities working group of the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities, which took place in Göttingen. The project is coordinated by Dr Jörg Wettlaufer. In regular meetings with the IT staff of the Academy's research projects, questions and possible solutions relating to the digital publication of research data and results are discussed. The central aim is to make the research results permanently and freely accessible online and within the framework of the NFDI initiative.

To the Göttingen Digital Academy

Research Data Guidelines

With the adoption of its Research Data Guidelines in March 2022, the Academy confirms its commitment to open access principles. Research data created and produced by the long-term projects that are part of the Academies' Programme in Göttingen are now generally made available to the public for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License (CC BY SA 4.0). The Academy strives for a uniform and standardised licensing practice. Deviating Creative Commons licences may be determined in individual cases in consultation with the Academy's respective research projects.

Download the Research Data Guidelines as PDF (in German)

Archiving Research Data

At the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, the staff of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities held three meetings to develop recommendations on data management and data archiving, which are now available for all Academy projects and initiatives. The recommendations come in the form of guiding questions and are intended to provide assistance in the application, implementation, and completion of projects relating to the archiving and maintenance of research data. They are based on an expanded definition of research data that also includes the presentation of research products, e.g. in the form of dictionaries and editions, and is not limited to text and image data.

Download the Recommendations for Archiving Research Data as PDF (in German)

Digital Library & ‘res doctae’

The Digital Library collects all databases that are generated within the Academy’s research projects, by members of the Academy, as well as by members of the different research commissions. It is possible to search content according to subject area, type of database, and the era or period of origin.

The document server ‘res doctae’ is the Academy’s first platform for the digital publication of research results. The name recalls the Academy’s first series of publications, the Göttingische Zeitungen von Gelehrten Sachen (Göttingen Journals of Scholarly Matters), which founding president Albrecht von Haller transferred to its care in 1753. It is still published even today under the name Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (Göttingen Scholarly Announcements) – now the world’s oldest review journal in the German language. As an institutional repository, ‘res doctae’ offers all members of the Academy as well as the members of its scientific commissions and projects the organisational and technical framework for the electronic publication of scientific documents.

To the Digital Library

To ‘res doctae’

Web Archive

The Academy’s Web Archive preserves snapshots of research project websites that are suitable for long-term archiving. This includes sites from projects within the Academies’ Programme, as well as other research initiatives supported by or conducted at the Academy. New snapshots are scheduled to be made available every six months. All archived pages are indexed for full-text search, enabling comprehensive content discovery. The Web Archive not only ensures long-term preservation but also provides access to content in cases where the original websites are temporarily unavailable.

Digitalisation