Improvement of Access to Data Sets from the Official Statistics

use of this service. The establishment of this grant was evaluated positively by the German
Council of Science and Humanities in its report.

The FDZ-BA is now networking more strongly with research data centres in other
countries. This ensures that new innovative developments can also be applied more quickly in
the FDZ-BA. These include, for example, anonymisation of datasets through multiple
imputation (Drechsler et al. 2007) or metadata databases.

For the quality of the data supply and the advisory service it is crucial, however, for FDZ-
BA employees to carry out empirical research themselves. The FDZ-BA’s research activities
are well documented through its publication record. In both 2006 and 2007, FDZ-BA
employees published a total of ten research articles. These also include two publications in top
scientific journals listed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). This picture has been
completed by numerous lectures about their research activities given in Germany and abroad.
In addition, the FDZ-BA participates in a number of externally funded projects, co-financed
by the German Research Foundation (DFG), the Federal Ministry of Education and Research
(BMBF) or the Leibniz Association and carried out in cooperation with universities, research
institutes and, of course, with the other research data centres. Each of these externally funded
projects also included funding for personnel.

3.4 Research Data Centre of the German Federal Pension Insurance (FDZ-RV)

The Research Data Centre of the German Pension Insurance was founded in January 2004 and
is now based in Berlin and Würzburg. During its initial setup phase, the FDZ-RV was funded
by the BMBF from 2004 to 2008.

The core task of the FDZ-RV is to recover the data treasures of the German federal
pension insurance (Rehfeld / Mika 2006). Alongside the microdata itself, the research data
centre provides methodological information and commentaries intended to help simplify
analyses using data from the German federal pension insurance. Current information on the
range of data, access routes, workshops and publications is available at www.fdz-rv.de.

The FDZ-RV has realised the projects it agreed to fulfil for the funding institution
(BMBF). Firstly, it has established an infrastructure within the research data centre, and
secondly, it has taken the research data centre from a pilot project to a permanent institution.
Thirdly, the range of data and the use possibilities have been extended considerably. In both
Berlin and Würzburg, the micro datasets of the federal pension insurance are processed in
cooperation with the respective departments and the data users, to make them available to
researchers particularly in the form of user-friendly scientific use files.

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