New specialist information service: Gender research accessible to everyone!

New specialist information service: Gender research accessible to everyone!

The Specialist Information Service (FID) for Gender Studies is being set up in Germany to create a central infrastructure for the provision of scientific information in this discipline. How FU Berlin reports, the project is intended to increase the visibility and innovative power of gender research.

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has funded the development of this service with 1.75 million euros for three years. The FID is sponsored by a consortium made up of several important institutions. These include the Margherita von Brentano Center at the Free University of Berlin, the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin, the University Library of the HU Berlin, the GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the Qualiservice research data center at the University of Bremen.

FID’s focus and offerings

A central focus of the FID is supporting researchers by providing relevant information and tools. The service has a strong focus on promoting open access and open science by supporting the OpenX initiative. This enables researchers to make their work freely accessible and access quality-assured information sources, promoting open access transformation in gender studies, such as MVBZ also highlighted.

An important element in this context is the Digital German Women's Archive (DDF), which not only plays a central role but also provides the feminist database META. This is being expanded as part of the FID in order to make the holdings on women's and gender history even more comprehensively digitally accessible.

• Der FID bündelt bestehende Rechercheinfrastrukturen.
• Er verbessert die Literaturversorgung in der Geschlechterforschung.
• Forschungsdatenservices und Vernetzungsmöglichkeiten werden erweitert.
• Ein zentrales Fachportal zur Geschlechterforschung soll im kommenden Jahr starten.

From 2026, the FID will offer workshops in various fields of action to address the needs of the specialist community. Consulting and training offers for sustainable research data management are also being planned.

Collaboration and networking

A key objective of the FID is to promote inter- and transdisciplinary gender research. The service aims to pool existing resources and create target group-specific offerings that support not only gender studies, but also other disciplines with gender-related or intersectional perspectives. Collaboration with the specialist community is actively sought in order to develop ideas for projects or events, they said Information and documentation center for gender studies.

In addition, the Gender Library at Humboldt University will offer support for research in gender studies. With a unique collection in 18 categories as well as personalized advice options, the library will be an important contact point for students and researchers. The brochure “Academic Work in Gender Studies” is also offered as a valuable resource.

The GenderOpen repository, the first open access repository for gender studies, will provide research results and publications, with more than 1,500 academic papers, including journals and monographs, already recorded. Authors are invited to publish their works under an open access license and thus increase the visibility of their research.