FIZ Karlsruhe

FIZ Karlsruhe is a private company and a recognized organization of public interest. The majority of our expenditures are covered by revenues generated in international markets – some 78% in 2014, an extremely high "self-financing rate". The remainder is funded by the German federal government and the German states. We have some 340 employees at three locations in Germany and at one location in the US. Our headquarters is in Karlsruhe.

We understand "information infrastructure" to mean all content, technology, methods, processes, and associated services needed to generate, share, and preserve knowledge. With the digitization of the sciences, the importance of information infrastructure as an enabler of research has grown immensely.

With our activities, we are making crucial contributions to improving the information infrastructure available to researchers: We provide valuable information to researchers both in academia and in the private sector. To this end, we curate and index a large volume of patent and research data from various sources, and we develop and operate various innovative services and e-research solutions. Last but not least, we provide guidance to our customers, helping them to use our services both capably and efficiently.

With STN International, our flagship service, we serve international market leaders in the pharmaceutical and chemicals industries, large patent offices, and research institutes. Yet we are one of the largest institutions of this kind.

Out highest priority is the quality of our services. Accordingly, we are engaged in various projects to keep our services at the cutting edge. This includes research into new techniques for text mining and semantic analysis.