GFZ Data Services GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences

Overview

GFZ Data Services is a research data repository for the Earth and environmental sciences, hosted at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum) in Potsdam, Germany. It curates, archives, and publishes geoscientific datasets and scientific software, assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to ensure long-term citability.

History and Founding

The GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences was founded in 1992 as a Crown Research Institute when the German government restructured its federal research landscape. GFZ Data Services began assigning DOIs to datasets in 2004, making it one of the earliest geoscience data publishers to do so. The repository has since grown into a core node of Germany's research data infrastructure.

Collections and Holdings

The repository covers a broad spectrum of geoscientific disciplines including seismology, volcanology, geodesy, geomagnetism, climate impact research, and environmental sciences. It serves as the official data publisher for several major international services and networks, including the World Stress Map, INTERMAGNET, GEOFON, the International Centre for Global Earth Models (ICGEM), and the Geophysical Instrument Pool Potsdam (GIPP). Collections range from large dynamic datasets generated by global monitoring networks to small long-tail datasets produced by individual research teams.

Access and Usage

All datasets are accessible via the GFZ Data Services metadata portal at dataservices.gfz-potsdam.de. Metadata are machine-readable and integrated into international portals via standardized interfaces including the Earth Data Portal of the Helmholtz Association's DataHub. The repository provides comprehensive consultation services by domain scientists and IT specialists to support data publication workflows.

Research Infrastructure

GFZ Data Services is the central node for research data management at GFZ. It operates as an Allocating Agent for the International Generic Sample Number (IGSN) and supports the Specialised Information Service for Solid Earth Geosciences (FID GEO). The repository supports FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and cross-references datasets with related research outputs via persistent identifiers.