Data stewardship and managing data skills are essential in research. The lack of consensus on the responsibilities, knowledge and skills of data stewards gives confusion about the role and hampers adequate data steward capacity. To our knowledge, also a coherent approach and dedicated training for data stewardship on the (inter)national level is lacking as well. This combined with the lack of sufficient funding limits vital developments such as recruiting procedures and defining career paths for the current and future data stewards.

In this BoF-session, we focus on involving the expertise of the RDA community to join forces in professionalizing data stewardship. The meeting objectives are:

• Exchange knowledge of and experiences in (inter)national efforts to professionalize data stewardship,
• Explore what is needed and what challenges need to be addressed to professionalize data stewardship,
• Discuss how we best get started with professionalizing data stewardship in the context of the RDA.

The expected output will be:

• A plan of action to promote professionalizing data stewardship in the context of the working/interest group structure of the RDA.

Collaborative session notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zcP2J5WxWM-s9mZWVj6uVZUkO6GZJ7Z29hr1oKUPU30/edit?usp=sharing  or https://tinyurl.com/yyh36xus

Link to slides: https://tinyurl.com/y2mgwt2e

Session chairs

Mijke Jetten (Radboud University), Marta Teperek (TUDelft), Iza Witkowska (Utrecht University)

Meeting agenda 

1. Introduction (11.00 – 11.10)

• Why, what, how of the session
• Get to know each other and our expectations (Mentimeter)

2. Presentation of case studies (11.10 – 11.35)

• Examples of what has been done so far in institutions and during subject related workshops
• Identifying main challenges in professionalizing data stewardship

3. Discussion in subgroups (11.35 – 12.10) 

• How do we tackle the identified challenges?
• If we organize ourselves successfully in the RDA, what would be our deliverables?

4. Wrap up/closure (12.10 – 12.30) 

• Report back per subgroup on deliverables/plan of action 
• Discuss follow-up actions
• Create a GDoc participants list for potential RDA (working) group via https://tinyurl.com/yyh36xus

This BoF-session builds on the outcomes of various previous activities on data stewardship:

• “Towards a community-endorsed data steward profession description in the life sciences” (https://zenodo.org/communities/nl-ds-pd-ls/about), including 
  • an overview of the data steward function landscape and its stakeholders (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3460552)
  • a job function for three types of data stewards, incl. responsibilities, tasks, KSAs and learning objectives (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3239079)
• LCRDM report “Data Stewardship on the map: A study of tasks and roles in Dutch research institutes” (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2669149)
• Porto Open Science FAIR “professionalise data stewardship” (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3420179)