Data stewardship?! π€·ββοΈ
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Hi my favorite reader π€π, I am currently preparing a workshop on research data managment (RDM) and the client asked me if I could include data stewardship in the workshop topics. So I researched what people actually mean, when they say data stewardship. I had a vague understanding of it, but the thorough researcher that I am I wanted to really understand it. Here's what I found... Data StewardshipData stewardship definition: Data stewardship means that you care about data (and it's quality) and that you handle it correctly and ethically and make sure others do too. β Everyone who works with data should practice data stewardship. Data StewardAs I understand, data stewards are not just people who practice data stewardship. Some people explain data steward in a more complex and thorough way and others in a more simple way: Complicated definition: data stewards work on data related topics in several areas including research, infrastructure, and policy making (see e.g. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3471708). They care about the ethical management and responsible handling of the resource βdataβ (Wikipedia). Simple definition: a data steward is your go-to person for data related questions (see e.g. the definition by TU Delft). β Data stewards are experts on data stewardship and it is a complex profession. What does this mean for you? If youβre a researcher, you are fine to go with the simple definition. A data steward will help you figure out your data questions. If you need to implement policies or want to build data infrastructure, specialized data stewards will help you with that. Itβs likely though, that your institution does not have enough data stewards to handle all of these complex tasks. Maybe your institution even has no data stewards at all. So Iβd like to end this post by letting you know, that we need more of these angels who work somewhere between support, research, policy, and infrastructure and Iβll leave you with a quote from Barend Mons: "We estimated that Europe will have at least 10 million serious data producers among its 70 million science and technology professionals and 1.7 million researchers. So we will need to educate about 500,000 data stewards of various kinds to support researchers through experimental design and data capture, curation, storage, analytics, publication and reuse." (https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00505-7) All the best, Heidi β P.S. If you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my work by leaving a tip.
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