This paper presents experiences and best practices from the process of providing grants to improve the FAIRness of existing datasets and reviews the results of the projects funded by KonsortSWD – NFDI4Society. KonsortSWD – NFDI4Society, as part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), supports the social, behavioral, educational, and economic sciences by providing a portfolio of services and tools for research data management to the scientific community. One cornerstone of this portfolio is the provision of grants to researchers for making existing research data available within the infrastructure of specialized research data centers (RDC) in accordance with the FAIR principles. Enriching existing data corpora by facilitating linkage to other data sources, thereby enlarging the analytical potential of these data sources, is an additional objective. Also, the benefits of providing grants are assessed. Across two founding rounds in 2021 and 2023, a total of 12 projects were granted funding from a total of 60 applications. By spring 2026, these projects published two anonymization concepts and made 10 new data corpora involving 60 data sets available for long-term reuse. This documentation contains appendices with relevant documents generated in the process including the contractual agreement.
Aßmann et al. (Mon,) studied this question.