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This paper provides guidelines for data management professionals and researchers on how FAIR data usage can help improve the planning, execution and overall success of a cross-institutional project. Cases from Danish cross-institutional projects are detailed to illustrate this point – as well as the lessons learnt with implementing FAIR data principles in such projects. Key learnings from this paper are:

Using FAIR data principles in cross-institutional projects can help manage the data used in the project in terms of knowledge sharing, access rights, use of templates, metadata and further sharing the data after the project has ended.
To benefit the most from using FAIR data in a cross-institutional project it should be considered and planned for early in the project process.
If FAIR is not considered early in the project process problems can arise such as a lot of time spent on converting formats, obtaining permissions and assigning metadata.
It is necessary for researchers and research projects to have infrastructure and other services in place which support FAIR data usage.

The chapter "Applications of Research Data Management at GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences" explores ways in which an archive - i.e. an organization whose work has a strong focus on preservation and dissemination of digital data - can become involved in research data management (RDM). The Data Archive looks back on a long history of working with researchers to make their data re-usable and accessible since 1960. Today it provides support for Research Data Management across the entire data lifecycle by offering a wide range of tools and services tailored to the needs of different types of stakeholders. The chapter gives an overview of selected tools and services offered in the areas of metadata and data documentation, data preparation, data publication, and long-term preservation. To illustrate how support for research data management plays out in different settings, three case studies for typical scenarios are presented: 1) The European Values Survey (EVS), a large international longitudinal survey studying basic human values across Europe. 2) The German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), a national survey program with a comprehensive approach to gain insights into the German federal elections. 3) A data center in the health sector which decided to make data originally collected to support policy-making available to research.