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Your data is protected!

The German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies GmbH (DZHW), Lange Laube 12, 30159 Hanover, represented by the Managing Director Prof. Dr. Monika Jungbauer-Gans, is responsible for the collection of data within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The DZHW is a non-profit organisation of the Federal Government and all the Federal States and has been using survey data for research on education and higher education policy for over 40 years. Detailed information about the DZHW and a range of scientific publications can be found at www.dzhw.eu/en.

Concept and contents of the survey

The prof*panel is the first nationwide panel survey of professors at German universities with a clear longitudinal design and the possibility of follow-up surveys. The first survey will start in June 2022. The first follow-up survey is expected to take place in spring 2023. Thereafter, follow-up surveys will take place at annual intervals.

The aim of the survey and subsequent scientific analyses is to empirically accompany the structural change of professorial career paths initiated with the introduction of the junior professorship in 2002 and the institutionalisation of the tenure track professorship in 2017. The range of topics therefore extends from information on your educational and career stages to the general conditions at your university as well as in the higher education system as a whole to professorial tasks and fields of activity, research profiles and activities. Your answers to the individual questions are voluntary; you have the option of skipping questions at any time.

Address inquiry

We have taken your address and affiliation from the electronic edition of the 2021 University Faculty Directory (Hochschullehrerverzeichnis).

Data retention and protection

Your name and your e-mail address (hereafter referred to as contact dataem>) are stored strictly separately from your other information in this survey (hereafter referred to as survey data). The contact data will be stored soley for the purpose of contacting you for follow-up surveys. As soon as the need to store the contact data is no longer given (usually after the last survey has been conducted) or consent given is revoked, this data is irrevocably deleted. The DZHW analyses the survey data together with selected paradata (time and duration of answering the survey, time spent on individual questionnaire pages, type of device used) exclusively for scientific purposes. For more in-depth interpretation, the survey data and paradata are linked to data through publicly accessible websites. The results of the analysis will not allow any conclusions to be drawn about individual persons.

The collection of personal data within the framework of the “DZHW Professors Panel” serves the sole purpose of scientific research. In the context of scientific use (scientific publications, applications for third-party funding, scientific presentations), the possibility of identifying individual survey participants is excluded. A large part of the survey data is made available to the scientific public (research and teaching) in anonymised form via the Research Data Centre of the German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies (FDZ-DZHW). The transfer of anonymised data is limited to designated scientific institutions. Provision for other than scientific purposes is excluded.

Legal basis

The legal basis for the processing is your consent given to us in accordance with Art. 6 para. 1 lit. a GDPR. Participation in the surveys is voluntary. Non-participation does not lead to any disadvantages.

We assure you that we

  • store your answers separately from your contact details and only for as long as needed,
  • treat your contact data as strictly confidential and not pass them on to third parties,
  • will use all survey data and information on how the questionnaire was completed exclusively for research purposes and will only make it available to other academics and students in anonymised form for research and practice purposes (this anonymised data does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about you),
  • will immediately delete your contact, survey, and paradata if you revoke your consent.

Furthermore, according to GDPR you have

  • the right to information about what data is stored about you,
  • the right to rectify the data stored about you,
  • the right to restrict the purposes for which the data is used,
  • the right to revoke your consent for the future, whereby the lawfulness of the processing carried out on the basis of the consent up to the revocation is not affected, however, as well as
  • the right to complain to the competent supervisory authority (the Federal Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information, Graurheindorfer Straße 153, 53117 Bonn, ).

Compliance with the precautions taken to protect your data is monitored by the responsible DZHW data protection officer, Martin Fuchs. If you have any questions regarding data protection, do not hesitate to contact:

DZHW-data protection officer:

Martin Fuchs

Tel.: +49 (0)511 450670-491
E-Mail:

For information about the research project as a whole, please contact the project management of the DZHW professors panel.