Towards a Community-Endorsed Data Steward Profession for Supporting Research

Sufficient, high quality data steward expertise and capacity in projects and institutes is one of the necessities for FAIR data management (in for instance Life Sciences and personalised medicine research). In a Dutch ZonMw funded project of UMCG, UMCU, Radboudumc, Radboud University and DTL, supported by the relevant national stakeholders, we aim to make the data steward function practical, creating consensus on the function and required competences, and develop suited education. This function and competences definition will be based on an analysis of existing competency frameworks for data management and stewardship and recently published reports such as the EOSC pilot, EDISON, HANDS handbook, and the Purdue and DAMA competences; complemented with a review of over 40 published vacancies texts and experiences of persons working in the field of data stewardship. The project that runs from August 2018 to August 2019 has already delivered a common function description based on the FAIR data principles and on knowledge, skills and competencies of a data steward that is broadly supported within the Dutch Life Sciences community, including research libraries. Coming months, the defined knowledge, skills and competences will be translated into concrete learning objectives, which in turn will be used to develop an education line and training materials for data stewards in for instance research libraries (including a design for an eLearning module). Sustainable implementation and alignment with existing education is ensured by close collaboration with Dutch initiatives such as the LCRDM, Data4lifesciences, the HANDS handbook, DTL and with universities (for applied sciences). With this project we contribute to a professionalization of the data steward function within the Life Sciences domain so future Life Sciences research can be optimally supported. In our presentation we will show the first results of the project, most importantly the competency profiles and knowledge base for two levels of data stewards, that will form the basis for the next activities in the project. We expect it to be relevant for research libraries as well, since many research data management (RDM) support services include similar data stewardship functions