NFDI-RFC - A Community Driven Standardization Service for Research Data Management

Michael Selzer, Christian Langenbach 

Standardization is pivotal for making research data FAIR, this means findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable - across disciplines and infrastructures. Inspired by the Inter- net Engineering Task Force’s (IETF) Request for Comments (RFC) model, we introduce NFDI-RFC, a community-driven service for the specification, discussion, and dissemination of research data management (RDM) practices, protocols, and guidelines within the Na- tional Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and beyond. The service provides a lightweight, transparent, and iterative pathway from early ideas to broadly adopted practices and, where appropriate, onward to formal standardization (e.g., DIN/ISO). We present (i) the scope and design principles of the NFDI-RFC service, (ii) the document classes and maturity stages, (iii) a governance and workflow model that balances editorial quality with open community review, (iv) an implementation leveraging GitLab for drafting, discussion, and traceability, and (v) an initial set of drafts, including style and authoring guides and an errata policy. We conclude with the next steps toward broader adoption across NFDI sections and consortia.