Knowledge is a Commons @ Wikimedia Germany
The SHIELD project is planning a workshop and panel discussion for Nov 23, 2026, in Berlin, in conjunction with Safeguarding Research and Culture and hosted by Wikimedia Germany. The title is Knowledge is a Commons: Collective Strategies for Defending Research and Culture. The date is intentionally adjacent to the Base4NFDI User Conference. It will be a full-day event consisting of an interactive workshop with individual pre-registration and a panel discussion open to the public.
Workshop: 2pm
Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attack on open science, data rescue initiatives have been fighting to preserve public access to publicly funded research and culture. Initiatives like Safeguarding Research and Culture (SRC) have secured terabytes of open data, scraped hundreds of public websites, and created SciOp, a data catalog utilizing an underlying peer-to-peer file sharing network to provide continuous access to saved datasets.
The recent elections in Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern serve as a warning: When government-funded research and culture are under threat, infrastructure is increasingly vulnerable, and institutional safety nets may become porous. Collective strategies encompassing not only institutions but also civil society and the scientific community are needed to ensure continuous access to public data even when institutions are at risk of being defunded, projects end, and researchers leave. SRC and TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and University Library provide a playbook of how institutions and NFDIs can adopt grassroots digital archiving approaches as a collective strategy to safeguard open knowledge. The SHIELD project at the TIB establishes SciOp as an additional layer of technical resilience at the institutional level, ensuring open data sets remain accessible and trustworthy for scientific reuse even in times of heightened infrastructural vulnerability. It is crucial to prepare now to enable civil society actors to maintain long-term access to public data. The workshop directly addresses technical, organizational, and (to a certain extent – we are no lawyers) legal questions about adding SciOp as another “onion peel” of making your data more resilient, for NFDIs and beyond.
Workshop team: Lambert Heller (TIB), Lisa Poggel (TIB), Julian Fietkau (TIB), Henrik Schönemann (SRC)
Registration
Registration for the workshop is open! The registration form is operated by TIB.
Note: this registration is only for the workshop. The panel in the evening is open to the public.
Panel: 7pm
The panel discussion reflects on changing and intertwined tasks and roles of institutions and civil society actors when it comes to safeguarding research and cultural data in times of crisis. It explores how grassroots initiatives like SRC and institutions can collaborate to share responsibility for maintaining open access to data in times of heightened infrastructural vulnerability. Wikimedia shows that this is possible: grassroots and institutional actors can successfully share stewardship over common knowledge.
Panel participants: Lisa Poggel (TIB), Henrik Schönemann (SRC), Lina (SRC), Sebastian Majstorovic (Data Rescue Project)
Time and Place
This event takes place on Nov 23, 2026. The workshop starts at 2pm, the panel at 7pm (CEST).
Wikimedia Deutschland
Tempelhofer Ufer 23/24
10963 Berlin
Questions: lambert.heller@tib.eu