Setting up a data steward team at Ghent University

In late 2018, Ghent University's Board of Governors approved a proposal from the institution's RDM working group to hire six full-time data stewards. It was the result of joint efforts by central services (especially the Library) and faculty representatives to identify a suitable model for professionalising RDM support and better tailoring it to the university's different scientific communities. To make the case and get buy-in from senior management, we pointed to the intensifying calls at the European and national level for making publicly funded research data as sustainable, open and FAIR as possible, to the proven need for broad cultural change among researchers, and to the potential risks to the institution of ignoring the current transition in science and scholarly communication. Moreover, the emergence of data stewardship programmes in the Netherlands in particular served as a major source of inspiration. Following the Board's decision, we focused on working out the practicalities and initiating the recruitment process, which was completed by the summer of 2019. Our data stewards have backgrounds in different disciplines and represent a mix of research experience and other skill sets. They hold open-ended, centrally funded positions and form a new team within the Library, which has a general mission to “facilitate open knowledge creation”. Set against the main task areas of data stewardship identified by Verheul et al. (2019)1, the data stewards at Ghent University will primarily operate as advisors rather than as operational data managers, although their job will also involve some more strategic and infrastructure-related work. Collaborating as a team should enable our data stewards to capitalise on their complementary areas of expertise, align their message and exchange best practices. Moreover, it should mean that every researcher has access to first-level RDM support, while ensuring that variation in demand from the university's eleven faculties can be dealt with in a flexible way. At the same time, the data stewards should emphatically not just be central support staff. While one steward coordinates the team, the others each act as the face and first point of contact for one of the university's five faculty clusters (Arts, Law & Humanities; Social & Behavioural Sciences; Natural Sciences; Life Sciences & Medicine; and (Bioscience) Engineering). Ensuring that the data stewards are sufficiently visible and present in the faculty clusters will undoubtedly present a challenge, as will demarcating their tasks more precisely in practice, and evaluating their impact. Nevertheless, the ongoing discussions about data stewardship and the growing recognition of this role in various countries, in specific scientific communities such as the life sciences, and in the context of the European Open Science Cloud makes this a particularly exciting time for Ghent University Library to establish a new team of dedicated RDM support staff