Professionalising Data Stewardship | Global updates to inform RDA community on future directions

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This webinar will present initial outputs from the RDA’s Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group (PDS-IG) and discuss potential directions for future work.  Attendees will have the opportunity to ask questions, suggest future areas of inquiry, and discuss ways to better connect the PDS-IG’s efforts with organisations and individuals within and outside of the Research Data Alliance.  

Overview of the Challenges related to Data Stewardship

Data stewardship, data management, and data governance are essential to research. Yet, the lack of consensus on the responsibilities, knowledge, skills, and value of research data stewards leads to confusion about how research data stewardship complements data management and governance functions across research and scholarly communications lifecycles. Unclear professional standards and models hamper the development of a trained, data steward workforce for research institutions; indeed a shared body of knowledge (BOK) for data stewardship professionals has yet to emerge, although dedicated training for data stewards is occurring. The various types of institutional data stewardship models are not well understood, nor are the unique needs of data stewards as compared to data managers and data privacy professionals who have access to global community-supported BOKs, professional networks, and events through associations such as such as the data managers focused DAMA International association, the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).  

History of the PDS-IG
 

Since 2016, the PDS-IG has brought together those interested in professionalising research data stewardship and those who are actively developing or informing data stewardship models, training and practice.  Forming from BoF sessions at P14, and P15, the RDA-PDS-IG was formally endorsed after VP16. From 2016 to 2021, initial topics of interest included: organizational models of data stewardship, terminology, training, and career tracks. 

Targeted Audiences
 

Individuals most interested in attending include: 

• Program officers and policymakers involved in fostering data stewardship practices at a national and global scale

•  Leaders managing or developing data stewardship programs

• Scholars of data stewardship

• Research data stewards seeking resources

How to Join the PDS-IG
 

The PDS IG is open to anyone looking to develop resources and advance research data stewardship. Regular community-wide communications occur in the RDA-PDS-IG Slack community (rdadatastewardship.slack.com). Between Plenaries, RDA-PDS-IG Co-Chairs communicate community consultations and announcements through the RDA-PDS-IG webpage (https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/professionalising-data-stewardship-ig).

Presenters

Christina Drummond, OA Book Usage Data Trust, Columbus, USA ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5794-0413 Christina serves as the Executive Director for the global OA Book Usage Data Trust (OAEBU) effort, which unites scholarly publishing stakeholders to enable the community governed sharing of quality, interoperable, usage data at scale through collective, automated data governance informed by the emerging International Data Spaces framework.

Yan Wang, Research Data Services, TU Delft, Delft, The Netherlands ORCID ID:  0000-0002-6317-7546 Yan works as the coordinator of the Data Stewardship at TU Delft, which focuses on enabling the organizational capability of embedding data governance and management practices into an operational workflow for research activities.

Graham Parton, Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA),  UK ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4157-0352 As a senior environmental data scientist for over 14 years, Graham supports researchers from the atmospheric, climate change, and earth observation communities to prepare and archive their data within CEDA’s domain repository. He also undertakes a range of activities around data standards, cataloging, discovery, and data licensing.

Liise Lehtsalu, Research Support Office, Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy ORCID ID: 0000-0002-6894-3377 Liise is a research support officer in Eurac Research where she coordinates and supports research data management strategy and policy development alongside work on more broad Open Science, research ethics, and pre-and post-award grant support themes and topics.

Jukka Rantasaari,  Library Services, Turku University Library, Turku, Finland  ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5927-3781   Jukka is a head of library services at the University of Turku, Finland. Areas of research services consist of metrics and evaluation services, research data management, open publishing, and CRIS services.

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