[18] Developing research data services for an emerging open science culture that lacks national policies and guidelines

Abstract: In contrast to many European countries, Sweden lacks a national open science policy, presently having no national guidelines for researchers, research infrastructures, and other actors on how to manage research data to make research data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). Even though there is no national policy, there is a strong movement in the professional development of research data management (RDM) competencies and skills at Swedish universities; university libraries playing an important role. Researchers are increasingly requesting support for RDM, partially due to the new Horizon 2020 requirement of data management plans. We also see a growing interest for making research data FAIR from researchers across disciplines. In this poster presentation, we describe our approach to developing research data services at Lund University Library. Our work is based on the premises that there are no national, nor university specific, policies or guidelines, whereas the needs for RDM support are growing, and will continue to grow as the open science movement evolves. Lund University is a broad university with eight faculties, each having its own faculty libraries. The library services are thus decentralized and are highly specialised towards their users. This local “closeness” could be of high value in the future, when researchers will need support on research data services. Lund University Library provides services for the entire University, and has worked with research data management since 2014. We started out by identifying the characteristics and requirements of research data produced or collected by researchers at the University, thus tailoring the research data services to Lund University’s research data. So far, we have conducted four studies: a study of the requirements for RDM within the humanities and social sciences; a survey of the current RDM practices at the University’s Faculties; an explorative study of individual researchers’ RDM practices; and a study investigating researchers’ needs of support for data management plans. Currently, we offer services including advice on trusted data repositories, metadata quality, and provenance, e.g. persistent identifiers for data. We also follow the RDM area closely, participating in a network of actors and professionals in the RDM field. Since 2014, we contribute to the development of the ICOS Carbon Portal, a research infrastructure on greenhouse gas. The services we offer have been developed from the bottom-up, from researchers’ requests. However, we see a shift in the interest for RDM on several levels. The University’s Research Board has set up a working group on research data, which is currently drafting a research data policy as part of an open science policy. With the growing interest from the University management, and national bottom-up initiatives of collaboration across universities, we anticipate contributing to the development of a University wide research data service organisation, which could be a network-based organization with nodes of different experts and professionals. We believe that librarians are well suited to coordinate such a network-based support organisation. Bio: Maria Johnsson is a librarian specializing in research support services in the Section of Scholarly Communication at Lund University Library. She has a special focus on research data management and e-science, and on how libraries may develop services within research data management. Before joining the University Library, she had a position at the Library of Faculty of Engineering, Lund University. She also has experience in working with library and information services at different companies. She has a Master’s in Library and Information Science, combined with studies in Modern Languages