The road to open science : The origin and design of the research data support at six Swedish university libraries

Introduction: The subject of research data management is highly topical and university libraries around the world are working hard to establish a well-functioning support as well as technical solutions to deal with sharing and storing research data. Swedish university libraries are no exception, and this study aims to give a clearer view on how these support functions have come to take the form they have today, what they look like now and what the plans are. Method: For this study eight people working with research data support at six Swedish university libraries were interviewed about the work of the support groups they are part of. These interviews were recorded and transcribed, and then analysed thematically by colour coding themes in the text. Analysis and results: The findings show that the persons working with data managing support at these six university libraries agree on many points of how the support needs to be developed to meet the students and researchers needs. One of the most important things of what the research data managing groups need to do are to supply more information sessions, workshops, and teaching to reach out with their knowledge and to make people more aware of their existence and competences. Another is making sure technical solutions are in place to store data throughout the different steps of the research data lifecycle. The training and development of the professionals working in the support groups is also a very important part, as this is a changing subject and the rules and regulations do change. Lastly the interviewees underline the importance of solid motivating factors for researchers to share their data. The data support groups can simplify the process of data sharing and make it easier and smoother for the researcher to do it, but if it is unclear why it should be done it will not happen. Conclusions: The development of the research data support has been, and is, slow and still ongoing. There is still a fair amount of work to be done, especially when it comes to the technical solutions that will enable safe and FAIR data sharing and storing. But the work that needs to be done cannot come only from university libraries and other university support functions, it must come from publishers, funders and other organisations that have the power to change the norms of data sharing. One of the main blockers of open data today is the lack of motivation for researchers to share their data and to be able to reach the goal of open data 2026 the entire system of merits for researchers needs to change and somehow include data sharing as an important part. This is a two-year master’s thesis in Library and Information Science