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Research infrastructures provide a wide range of research data services, like repositories or software tools, as well as activities including training and community engagement. Demonstrating how these services and activities contribute to scientific and societal impact is important for funders, stakeholders and the wider research community. However, their long-term outcomes and impact are often not explicitly described, making them difficult to communicate and reuse in different research infrastructure contexts. Although key performance indicators (KPIs) are often collected and used, they are frequently interpreted without sufficient context and mainly capture outputs rather than explaining how services and activities lead to long-term outcomes and impact. Impact pathways provide a structured way to represent the causal steps through which activities contribute to outcomes and long-term impacts (ELIXIR’s Impact toolkit). However, existing approaches are often developed for specific purposes, resulting in different terminology and structures that limit comparability and reuse of impact-related knowledge across research infrastructures.
This project aims to develop a reusable impact pathway approach for research data services and activities by building on community-driven use-cases and translating them into structured, and collaboratively developed templates that can be applied across research infrastructures. During the hackathon, we will:
- Investigation and mapping: Compare existing impact use-cases from different research infrastructure contexts (e.g. de.NBI, ELIXIR, NFDI) to identify common concepts and propose terminology for key concepts such as activities, outputs, outcomes, indicators, evidence and impact.
- Conceptual model and template design: Translate use-cases into reusable impact pathway templates describing how specific efforts contribute to outcomes and impact.
- Documentation and application: Document the results in a pre-established collaborative knowledge base, develop an interactive decision tree within the knowledge base to support the creation of tailored impact pathways, and define system prompts for AI agents to enable guidance for developing impact pathways through an interview-based process.
The expected outcomes are a shared conceptual model for reusable impact pathways, as a set of templates covering different research data services and activities, and documented use cases contributed by participants. The project will use a knowledge base as a collaboration platform, supported by a lightweight technical representation enabling future reuse and extension. By structuring impact pathways in a reusable format, the knowledge base will provide a foundation for potential future integration into established community resources, enabling broader reuse of impact pathways and supporting AI-assisted guidance tools. This will help users interested in evaluating the impact of their research data services and activities to find a specific impact pathway applicable on their dedicated use case.
The project brings together participants from a wide variety of (inter-) national initiatives such as de.NBI, ELIXIR, NFDI (e.g. FAIRagro, NFDI4BioDiversity, DataPLANT, Base4NFDI), regional RDM initiatives (e.g. HeFDI, fdm.nrw, Datenkompass M-V, FDM.SH, FDM-NDS) and research communities such as CEPLAS (Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences). The team combines expertise in research infrastructure coordination, research data management, training, service provision and community engagement to ensure that the developed approaches reflect real-world needs across diverse infrastructure contexts.