Your role: Data Steward

Introduction

Data stewardship is a relatively new profession and a catch-all term for numerous support functions, roles and activities. It implies professional and careful treatment of data throughout all stages of a research process.

The core responsibilities and tasks vary, from policy advising and consultancy, to operational and technical support and IT related tasks. Responsibilities also vary between and among the different research-performing organisations, and data stewards (DS) often have different job titles.

Data stewards can be categorised in different ways, for example according to their

place in an organisation: coordinator or generic data stewards (hired in a central library, for example), and embedded data steward (working for a research department or project), or
on their topic focus: policy oriented, research oriented and infrastructure oriented.
See Mijke Jetten, Marjan Grootveld, Annemie Mordant, Mascha Jansen, Margreet Bloemers, Margriet Miedema, & Celia W.G. van Gelder. (2021). Professionalising data stewardship in the Netherlands. Competences, training and education. Dutch roadmap towards national implementation of FAIR data stewardship. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4623713. See also https://competency.ebi.ac.uk/framework/datasteward/1.0 .

Role	Description
Coordinator / generic DS	Acts as a centralised knowledge hub and is able to advise on organisational policies, guidelines, infrastructure and tools. They may coordinate embedded data stewards.
Embedded DS	Works directly for research departments or research teams and offers support and hands on help with any RDM matter from collection of data to publishing and long-term preservation.
Policy-oriented DS	Focuses on policy development and the implementation of research data management practices in their organisation. They may coordinate other data stewards in their institutions.
Research-oriented DS	Works directly with researchers and offers support with RDM matters. They make sure data is handled in compliance with the institute’s policy and they can also perform hands-on work in a project.
Infrastructure-oriented DS	Translates the requirements of policies and science into suitable IT solutions and tools as well as provide advice. They implement IT infrastructure solutions, give access to data and software for researchers.

Data management responsibilities

As a data steward, you are supporting researchers in data handling before, during and after a research project. You need to be aware of how to best support making data more sustainable and remain valuable after a research project ends.

In your role of data steward, you may need to:

Act as a knowledge and communication hub;
Advise and support on policy, guidelines, infrastructure, services and tools;
Align support functions, tool landscape and RDM policy to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and the principles of Open Science;
Develop, implement, monitor and evaluate policies regarding research data;
Translate RDM policy and legislation to RDM guidelines and tool selection that researchers can easily use.

Data management guidance

RDMkit pages

The RDM life cycle pages give an overview of data management tasks.
Your domain pages have a description of domain-specific data management challenges, considerations to be taken into account and solutions used by the community to address the challenges. You will also find training material and links to relevant tools and resources.
Your task pages are organised around regular RDM tasks and challenges. You will find best practices, guidelines, training material as well as links to tools and resources.
The National resources pages point to country-specific information resources such as local funding agencies and research councils, and information on local policies for open science, national regulations on data ethics, and domain-specific infrastructures and tools.

Other resources

FAIR Cookbook gives you step by step recipes to complete common data management tasks.
Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) guides you through creating a data management plan.
FAIRification Framework guides you through making your data FAIR.
TeSS is a life science training portal, where you can search for training courses or materials on data management.
FAIRsharing is a portal where you can search for databases, standards and policies.

More information

National resources

Tools and resources tailored to users in different countries.

Tool or resource	Description	Related pages	Registry
Belnet	Belnet is the privileged partner of higher education, research and administration for connectivity. We provide high-bandwidth internet access and related services for our specific target groups.	Researcher Research Software Engi... Data transfer
DMPonline.be	This instance of DMPonline is provided by the DMPbelgium Consortium. We can help you write and maintain data management plans for your research. DMPRoadmap	Researcher Data management plan
Flemish Supercomputing Center (VSC)	VSC is the Flanders’ most highly integrated high-performance research computing environment, providing world-class services to government, industry, and researchers.	Research Software Engi... Data analysis Data storage
PIPPA	PIPPA, the PSB Interface for Plant Phenotype Analysis, is the central web interface and database that provides the tools for the management of the plant imaging robots on the one hand, and the analysis of images and data on the other hand.	Plant Phenomics Plant sciences Researcher Research Software Engi...	Tool info
RDM Guide	RDM Guide describes Belgian data management guidelines, resources, tools and services available for researchers in Life Sciences.	Researcher
Czech National Repository	National Repository (NR) is a service provided to the scientific and research communities in the Czech Republic to store their generated research data together with persistent DOI identifier. NR service is currently under the pilot program.	Researcher Research Software Engi... Data storage Existing data Identifiers Data management plan
e-INFRA CZ (Supercomputing and Data Services)	e-INFRA CZ provides integrated high-performance research computing/data storage environment, providing world-class services to government, industry, and researchers. It also cooperates with European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) implementation in the Czech Republic.	Research Software Engi... Data analysis Data storage
GHGA	The German Human Genome-Phenome Archive.	Data storage Documentation and meta... Researcher
PUBLISSO	Open access publishing platform for life sciences.	Data publication Researcher
REDCap Estonia	This is the Estonian instance of REDCap, which is a secure web platform for building and managing online databases and surveys. REDCap	Data quality
Datos.gob.es	Open data portal of the spanish government. A meeting point for the various actors that make up the open data ecosystem.	Researcher Research Software Engi...
Recolecta	The national aggregator of open access repositories. This platform brings together all the Spanish digital infrastructures in which open access research results are published and / or deposited.	Researcher Research Software Engi...
Red Española de Supercomputación	The Spanish Supercomputing Network’s mission is to offer the resources and services of supercomputing and data management necessary for the development of innovative and high-quality scientific and technological projects, through competitive calls based on the scientific excellence of the projects to be developed.	Researcher Research Software Engi...
RedIRIS	Spanish academic and research network that provides advanced communication services to the scientific community and national universities.	Researcher Research Software Engi...
Cloud computing	CSC offers a variety of cloud computing services: the Pouta IaaS services and the Rahti container cloud service.	CSC Researcher Data analysis
DMPTuuli	Data management planning tool (Finland). DMPRoadmap	CSC Researcher Data management plan
Fairdata.fi	With the Fairdata Services you can store, share and publish your research data with easy-to-use web tools.	CSC Researcher Data storage Data publication Existing data
Federated EGA Finland	FEGA allows you to store and share sensitive data in Finland in a way that fulfils all the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA)	CSC Researcher Data sensitivity Data publication Existing data Human data
Findata	The Health and Social Data Permit Authority. Findata offers services and enables secure and efficient utilisation of data materials containing health and social data.	CSC Researcher Data sensitivity Existing data Human data
Fingenious	Finnish Biobank Cooperative (FINBB) connects researchers to Finnish biomedical research. Via Fingenious® services the researcher can connect to all Finnish public bio banks.	CSC Researcher Data sensitivity Human data
High performance computing	CSC Supercomputers Puhti, Mahti and LUMI performance ranges from medium scale simulations to one of the most competitive supercomputers in the world.	CSC Researcher Data analysis
Sensitive Data Services for Research	CSC Sensitive Data Services for Research are designed to support secure sensitive data management through web-user interfaces accessible from the user’s own computer.	CSC Researcher Data sensitivity Data analysis Data storage Data publication Human data
DMP OPIDoR	Online questionnaire for the development of data management plans - repository of DMPs. DMPRoadmap	IFB Researcher Data management plan
Open-science.it	Italian portal dedicated to the field of open science.	Researcher Data management plan
RETTE	System for Risk and compliance. Processing of personal data in research and student projects at UiB.	Human data Data security GDPR compliance Data sensitivity Policy maker
BioData.pt Data Management Portal (DMPortal)	This instance of Dataverse is provided by the BioData.pt. We can help you write and maintain data management plans for your research. DATAVERSE	Researcher Data storage	Tool info Standards/Databases
BioData.pt Data Stewardship Wizard	This tool guides users through generating Data Management Plans. Data Stewardship Wizard	Researcher Data management plan	Tool info
dados.gov.pt	Open data portal of the Portuguese Public Administration.	Researcher Data publication Existing data
eLab BioData.pt	An electronic lab notebook (ELN) for BioData.pt training programmes (data wiped periodically).	Researcher Principal Investigator... Documentation and meta... Data quality Project data managemen... Data provenance Machine actionability
INDEXAR	National directory of repositories and digital scientific journals, in the fields of science and culture.	Researcher Data publication Existing data
Agrischema	Linked data schemas for the fields of agriculture, food, agri-business, plant biology.	Researcher Documentation and meta...
CyVerse UK	The CyVerse Data Store is a cloud-based storage space, accessible via the CyVerse Discovery Environment (DE), a virtual bioinformatics lab workbench, and developer APIs such as the AGAVE API. In the DE, users can share datasets and tools to analyse data with as many or as few people as they wish.	Researcher Documentation and meta...
DMPonline	DMPonline is a web-based tool that supports researchers to develop data management and sharing plans. It contains the latest funder templates and best practice guidelines to support users to create good quality DMPs. DMPRoadmap	Researcher Data management plan
InterMine	InterMine integrates heterogenous data sources, making it easy to query and analyse data.	Researcher Documentation and meta...
Jisc Research data management toolkit	Guidance on the research data lifecycle that signposts resources from a wide range of organisations and websites.	Researcher Documentation and meta...

Contributors