Gatekeeper – a comprehensive approach to connect data sources across the ETH Domain

To ensure data to be sustainably FAIR and research to be reproducible, lab data management (LDM) and electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) must not evolve as separate systems, but rather ELNs need to be integrated into LDM. To address this need, we propose Gatekeeper, an extension of the already existing Renku platform. Gatekeeper is a centralized system that facilitates research data management across the complete project life cycle, including user access management, versatile integration of different sources, data sharing, archiving, and publication. This Renku extension acts as a middle layer that allows project-specific access to all connected data, independent of its source. In this proposal we will focus on extending Renku regarding the connection and metadata management for ELNs and other sources used in our consortium. New data sources can be integrated in a modular fashion, ranging from low-level and simple linking of data to in-depth integration including data integrity and metadata sanity checks. This modular set-up allows community-driven dissemination of Renku extensions and refinements across future users.