Data Stewardship Competence Centers (DSCC)

Active GO FAIR Implementation Network
Universities and other research performing institutions (RPI) across Europe, and globally, face the challenge of establishing professional, institution-wide research data stewardship and building its related infrastructure. Research ‘Data Stewardship Competence Centers’ (DSCC) collaborate with the researchers in their institutions to enable better data management and comply with FAIR principles, also to better support open science.

As many of the crucial decisions around data stewardship, including the use of interoperable protocols, standards, formats, and terminology systems will be made within the EU network of these DSCCs, they will also play a key role in the drive towards international convergence for interoperability and reuse of research outputs in open science environments. Next to institutional DSCCs there is a need for consolidation of good practices per domain in supra-institutional DSCCs, national and international. These may also become members of this IN.  

The establishment and running of DSCCs is a collaborative mission within a complex socio-technological environment.  Many stakeholders contribute to building the competent DSCCs at universities and other RPI. The most effective and efficient way to build stable institution-wide DSCC is when existing competence centres of universities or RPI collaborate, network and share their accumulated experience, since many of the crucial skills and good practices are generic and would ideally be shared between centres, thus avoiding to operate in isolation and duplicate efforts. In particular, the most difficult and at the same time most important aspects for the establishment of competence centres – including  a cultural change within the universities or research institutions – should be promoted and facilitated by such networking, through “speaking with one voice” about the needs for appropriate FAIR-compliant data stewardship being key to enabling open science.

The DSCC IN is composed mainly by individual national DSCC chapters that can reflect local setup needs and ensure a functioning network of DSCCs on the national or regional level.  

Main objectives and tasks
There are clear and expressed needs for DSCCs in universities and other research and data-intensive institutions, including for instance ministries, public-sector organisations and private companies. A network/cooperation structure in the form of a GO FAIR Implementation Network (IN) is the key step towards establishing a broader consensus on the requirements for sustainable DSCC infrastructures and on professional data stewardship skills. As is true for any GO FAIR IN, also this one is open to all partners that share our goals and sign up for the GO FAIR Rules of Engagement. 

The overall aim of this IN is networking and establishing pragmatic cooperation, reuse of assets and convergence between national and international DSCCs at universities or other research performing institutions (RPI). The DSCC IN partners are committed to mutual support for continuous and collaborative improvements to RDS services, especially in their implementation of the FAIR principles. Strong emphasis will be put on joint development of skills, requirements, services and the underlying protocols, formats, templates, and standards that will drive interoperability and reuse through practical convergence, especially across geographical and disciplinary borders.

This mutual support and knowledge transfer might contain, for example:

• Co-develop and share awareness building methods and good practices in FAIR research data stewardship.
• Jointly evaluate optimal technologies, software, open source code, repositories, etc to build and maintain (an IN connectable) national IT infrastructure also usable within the new generation research workspaces (cloud, FAIR, VRE).
• Develop and share FAIR metadata templates (generic or discipline-specific), and coordinate this over various disciplines and domains, in close collaboration with international organisations. 
• Jointly develop strategies to deal with data privacy, licensing, security and copyright.
• Test and feedback to funders on recommendable tooling for FAIR compliant RDS.
• Jointly develop requirements and skill sets needed and training/education requirements for data stewards.
• Share and where needed participate in the development of e-learning tools, courses and curricula for professional data stewards.
• Share and co-develop approved incentives for research data stewardship.
• Share/compare strategies to make DSCC sustainable in the long-term.

Manifesto
Link to manifesto in PDF

Events
04-05 October 2021: National Chapters’ Meeting

Contact
Valentina Pasquale, valentina.pasquale@iit.it
Diba Terese Markus, dtm@aub.aau.dk
Angus Whyte, a.whyte@ed.ac.uk

National Chapters

Are you interested in joining the DSCC IN? Please express your interest by filling in the form below. Your request will be forwarded to the IN Coordinator who will get in touch as soon as possible.

Partners
Lluís Alfons Ariño Martin, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Spain
Silke Bellanger, University of Basel, Switzerland
Miriam Braskova, Erasmus Research Institute of Management, The Netherlands
Roberto Buccione, San Raffaele Hospital, Italy
Maria Luiza Campos, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil
Anders Conrad, Danish e-infrastructure Cooperation, Denmark
Melissa Cragin, San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), University of California San Diego, US
Anna Maria Eleuteri, Università di Camerino, Italy
Christopher Erdmann, UNC RENCI, US
Ester Ernest Mnzava, Sokoine University of Agriculture, Tanzania
Erik Flikkenschild, Leiden University Medical Centre, The Netherlands
Signe Gadegaard, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Alessa Gambardella, independent researcher
Celia van Gelder, DTL Dutch Techcentre for Life Sciences / ELIXIR-NL, The Netherlands
Sofia Georgakopoulou, University of Basel, Switzerland
Roman Gerlach, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany
Elena Giglia, University of Turin, Italy 
Daniela Hausen, RWTH Aachen University , Germany
Patrick Helling, Data Center for the Humanities (DCH), University of Cologne, Germany
Patricia Henning, GO FAIR Brazil (Health Brazil IN) 
Nancy Hoebelheinrich, Knowledge Motifs LLC, USA
Samson Jarso, Mbarara Univeristy of Science and Technology, Uganda/Johns Hopkins University, USA, Uganda
Andreas Jaunsen, Nordforsk / NeIC, Norway
Jacko Koster, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Monika Linne, Cologne Competence Center for Research Data Management (C³RDM), University of Cologne, Germany
Dries Moreels, Ghent University Library & DMP Belgium consortium, Belgium
João Luiz Rebelo Moreira, GO FAIR Brazil (U. Twente) 
Marco Morelli, San Raffaele Hospital, Milan, Italy
Brendan Palmer, University College Cork, Ireland
Valentina Pasquale, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Italy
Maria Pawlowska, Visnea, Poland
Carmen Reverté, IRTA, Spain
Thierry Sengstag, University of Basel, Switzerland
Laurents Sesink, Leiden University, The Netherlands
Benjamin Slowig, Landesinitiative fur Forschungdatenmanagement, Germany
Magdalena Szuflita-Żurawska, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
Diba Terese Markus, Aalborg University, Denmark
Viviane Veiga, Fiocruz, Brazil
Anna Wałek, Gdańsk University of Technology, Poland
Angus Whyte, Digital Curation Centre, UK
Anna Widyastuti, Universiteit Hasselt, Belgium