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Docata 2.0 goes online

The University of Erfurt has just launched its web portal for doctoral students with the "Docata 2.0" software. This means that applications for acceptance as a doctoral student and applications for admission to the doctoral or examination procedure will in future be submitted exclusively in digital form, with an online assistant guiding through the application procedure. The fact that this is possible at all is thanks to the now digital data capture and administration in the doctoral system.

With Docata, the "paperwork" surrounding doctoral studies at the University of Erfurt is now more transparent, simpler and less - for everyone involved, i.e. for the doctoral students themselves as well as for the staff of the faculties and the central Graduate Service.

The web portal offers doctoral students many advantages, such as:

  • direct access to all important forms relating to the doctorate;
  • access to forms pre-filled with stored data;
  •  online assistants who guide through important applications, e.g. the assistant for acceptance as a doctoral candidate, which is already productively switched on;
  • and the paperless submission of documents.

The staff in the administrative units also benefit:

  • a complete registration of all doctoral students is guaranteed;
  • doctoral students can voluntarily enter additional data to improve the central service;
  • documents and certificates are pre-filled with stored data;
  • statistics for reports can be called up at the push of a button.

Naturally, all data is handled with the greatest care and in accordance with current data protection regulations. This guarantees a comprehensive data protection concept.

The background for the introduction of Docata is the amendment of the German Higher Education Statistics Act in 2016, which has resulted in new requirements for the collection and processing of data on doctoral students. As part of the first notification of doctoral student statistics on 1 December 2017, this data was collected or post-collected manually and with a high administrative effort. However, since the manual compilation of the statistics is not a permanent solution, the Presidential Board of the University of Erfurt decided on 25 October 2017 to introduce a university-wide portal for doctoral and postdoctoral student administration. In a further stage of development, Docata will also offer services for postdocs in the future.

Prof. Walter Bauer-Wabnegg, president of the University of Erfurt, expressed his satisfaction with the productive implementation of the web portal: "Docata is service at the touch of a button. The launch of the web portal is a further milestone on the road to digitisation at our university. Paperless applications and automated reports give our doctoral students and staff valuable time that they can use elsewhere in the future". And Benedikt Kranemann, Vice President for Research and Young Academics, adds: "The Docata introductory project has also taken us a big step forward on the path we have taken by founding our Christoph Martin Wieland Graduate Forum. Together we have achieved something! In a labour-intensive process over almost three years, the people involved in doctoral administration have introduced a system that now professionalises contact with our doctoral students in a modern way and also enables us to gain access to the entire doctoral student body in the first place. This would not have been possible without the good cooperation of all the departments involved, and for this we would like to thank all those who have been so involved in the process."

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