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Improvement of the Informational Infrastructure
Since 1 January 2007, working in cooperation with the Länder, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) has been supporting a research data centre at the 
IQB (Institute for Educational Progress), thereby giving the scientific community access to data from national and international comparative performance assessments.
To enable data from BMBF-funded projects to be available for reanalyses and secondary analyses, the BMBF requires project participants to make project data available to suitable institutions following project completion (for example, by submitting the data to the Data Archive of the German Social Science Infrastructure Services Association (GESIS)). Such institutions will then archive and describe the data, and make them available to the scientific community on request.
In addition, the BMBF provides funding for combining data from repetitive studies, in the interest of facilitating secondary longitudinal evaluations.
The National Educational Panel Study represents another central measure for improving the informational infrastructure. Experience gained both within Germany and abroad indicates that such initiatives have a highly positive influence on development of disciplines.