How do Denmark and the Netherlands look at the roles and stakeholders in the data stewardship landscape?
Surprisingly similar.
Both countries have done extensive work to professionalise data stewardship and are highlighted in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) (p.128).
These efforts could serve as the basis for the EOSC Skills agenda for data stewardship.
In Denmark, national recommendations have been provided to gather evidence for supporting pre-qualifications for data steward education at universities (Wildgaard 2020) and the first Master in Data Stewardship is expected to start in September 2021.
In the Netherlands, a community-endorsed data stewardship competency framework was developed and recommendations for national implementation of a national FAIR Data Stewardship Roadmap have been formulated, which can now be taken further by the national stakeholders (Scholtens 2019; Jetten 2021).
EOSC is in an excellent position to coordinate and to support Member States in building the data stewardship capacity that is needed.
It therefore states two major complementary actions which are required to close the skills gap.
- First, the necessity to train future data stewards based on an accredited curriculum in Europe’s universities.
- Second, current professionals in the field need to be (up-)skilled and proper career paths for data stewardship need to be defined and acknowledged.
By ensuring research groups access the help of data stewards, research outputs will be more effectively managed and shared, ensuring higher quality, reproducibility and more consistent long-term sharing and reuse.
Check out the full report here and look for the description of these two use cases on p.128.