 Today indeed we would like to tell you a little bit about the role and value of the data steward and that's based on our case study from TU Delft and why we wanted to talk the two of us it's because indeed I'm coordinating the whole program but we thought it would be very nice for you to also hear from a data steward who is actually doing the work and working with researchers so you can have both of us with slightly different perspective on the program and on the whole initiative so you already know who you who we are and just to start with a quick outline of the presentation we would first like to give you a short introduction to TU Delft as an organization so just that you have a little bit of a context of how big the organization is what kind of focus do we have and then we would like to explain to you the rationale behind the data stewardship project so how this whole thing came about why did we want to start with the data stewardship uh secondly thirdly Esther will tell about the key principles behind the project and finally we will both talk about the key challenges and future outlook and of course open the floor for questions so let's start with the introduction to the adult so some of you I understand that we are from geographically different regions we thought that maybe that's nice to just say what is TU Delft and not so worry is TU Delft for people who don't know the small little country the Netherlands so well so TU Delft stands for Delft University of Technology and as the name suggests that's actually a university we have a lot of technical applications of our research so lots of industry collaborations and that also implies a little bit about what kind of support we need to provide of two researchers of course industry collaboration means tensions between open science and the ability to share our research more freely with the world and in terms of where Delft is when you look at the map of the Netherlands Delft is just sort of between the Hague and Rotterdam so in this cluster of a lot of cities in the Netherlands and some statistics and we are showing statistics from 2017 not because we were lazy and we didn't want to update our slides but because our statistics office hasn't yet produced the statistics for 2018 so hope you can bear with us and in general TU Delft is quite a research intensive institution and in 2017 we've been actually the 11th top beneficiary of Horizon 2020 findings so you can see lots of research is happening lots of research grant that's quite an important income stream and as I mentioned before a lot of industry collaboration which is another important income stream for our institution and also as you see being a beneficiary of Horizon 2020 findings so funding so open data pilot all that commitment to open science and that industry collaboration there is a bit of a clash there that we have to manage and our data stewards are trying to do in their daily work. We have eight different faculties at TU Delft they all support more of an applied sciences but they differ between each other so we have everything from aerospace engineering all the way through applied sciences and to then how do we apply all those technologies into life so like technology policy management so the ethics of technology so they are quite diverse in the type of research for all that research focus on how do we actually apply our research findings into daily lives and we have 5 000 employees and maybe that's quite important to say that in the Netherlands this means that we include PhD students PhD students have an employee status in the Netherlands and apart from that we have 23 500 as of 2017 students and that number is actually quite rapidly growing so that's the introduction to TU Delft I hope you have a little bit of a better picture of what kind of institution we are that we are quite research intensive with lots of industry collaborations and now I would like to talk about how this whole data stewardship project came about why did we want to do that why did we want to start this and it really starts from the core mission of TU Delft so as I mentioned at TU Delft we do a lot of things which have to be or are our mission is to apply it for the society so TU Delft has issued the strategic framework for the years 2018-2024 which the whole title of the framework is Impact for a Better Society and obviously to make an impact for a better society you need to share the knowledge the findings with the people around you so consequently openness is one of the four major principles which guide the whole framework so if you look at this you can say that openness is really embedded it's one of the core values that we share at TU Delft and you may ask a question why openness why do we think that openness is so important so on top of what I've already mentioned openness means openness and sharing with the society another important aspects of openness that is that transparency and research reproducibility go really along that and probably you've heard about this that open science is just science done right I think it's quite a nice quote that has been around for quite a while and it really underlines the principles that if you are open with your research results if you make your research results available for scrutiny you allow the science to self-correct itself so we really promote better better quality research but still you might ask a question how did it all begin like how did you actually come up with the idea of having a dedicated data stewardship project what that actually is so as I mentioned before because openness was so important but researchers come and go we have lots of researchers at the faculty so not everybody really thought about open science as their core principles so we had to do lots of advocacy efforts to make sure that researchers understand the importance of open science so back in 2015 so quite a while ago now my colleagues and you have the three pictures of my colleagues at the bottom of the slide need a series of open science roadshows at all all the faculties at TU Delft so they went to every faculty every department within the faculty so more than 40 presentations in 2015 to try to tell researchers about the importance of open science in their day to day research practices and as a result researchers of course nobody questioned the importance of open science yes we should share our research with the society that sounds all good but researchers had some concerns they were wondering that all sounds great but we are extremely busy we don't want more work we need less work we need to be a bit more efficient so we would like to get dedicated support if you want us to follow open science principles that's fine but you need to support us appropriately so that was quite important and thankfully the colleagues that were giving those presentations thought okay if that's really what researchers want to have let's see what we can do about this and then there was this whole thought that indeed if we want to promote open science if we want to do research more reproducibly we have to think about all that support we provide researchers from the very start of their research project in a way if you think about this if you would come to a researcher towards the very end when they are publishing the results when they are closing up their research grants and you tell them now open up everything but they haven't been managing the research data from the very start they don't have any metadata they don't have any provenance tracking or version control of what they've been doing sharing is quite a challenge how can you share your data how can you share your research if you are not sure which figure was generated with what data exactly so we thought we actually can't just promote open science tell people share your data at the time of publication we have to go back much earlier and involve researchers much earlier in the process and support them in good data management practices from the very start and then talk and see if something can be open and shared with the others or not so that was the whole principle we decided to take a step back if we really care about open science we need to work with our researchers at an earlier stage and we discussed that whole thing with our leadership and at that stage at that time our rector Magnificos Attilda was Carol Lyban and I'm mentioning his name because some of you might be familiar Carol was pioneer of open science at our campus and he's now also involved in the european open science cloud he's the chairman of the project so perhaps more of you would be in touch with Carol he's a really person advocating for open science principles and consequently because openness was so important Carol said that if researchers need that support to go a step forward with open science we need to support them if we really care as an institution we need to stand behind what we preach and that's why Carol said that's higher some data stewards that can help with researchers that can guide them through that process of data management so what happened as a consequence of that we got strategic support for the initiation of data stewardship project we got some central funding from the central university to pick start the whole project that you developed and the money was given us for three years from the beginning of 2018 until the end of 2020 so as you see we are sort of halfway through that project right now and just to mention because sometimes people asked like who are the data stewards how are they positioned within the institution we wanted to make sure that data stewards are working very close to researchers Esther will of course expand on that later on but just wanted to give you a picture of how data data support is structured at TU Delft. TU Delft is part of the consortium of four technical universities which manage the 40-year center for research data that's our data archive for technical universities and we also have a dedicated central research data support team at the library myself the data stewardship coordinator I'm based in the library as part of the core research data support team and then the data stewards and you can see the purple boxes on the right hand side they're based at faculties as I mentioned we have eight different faculties there are eight data stewards one at every faculty and they are line managed by faculty executive secretaries you might want to think what why a secretary is managing a data steward actually those executive secretaries are the second most important most powerful people at the faculty so that means that the faculties really embrace data management principles and also for the data stewards they get a lot of advocacy about the importance of good data management and as you if you would like to see that way my role is to connect the data stewards with the central support team at the library so we try to build on synergies between those two teams and the second important principle before as the takes over I promise you would tell you about more about what the data stewards actually do but just wanted to reflect on that that this importance of this disciplinary support and starting early starting with researchers was also reflected in our policy development strategy our tu delft research data framework policy which is published so if you would like to read it there is a link underneath defines the roles and responsibilities of different stakeholders at the university level so for example what the library needs to do in order to support good data management what does the executive board needs to do to support good data management practice what are the responsibilities of the legal team and so forth there are several compulsory statements which everybody needs to comply with and the framework policy also contains templates for faculties that's something which is already approved and published but what is also quite important for us and Esther will talk about this a little bit more every faculty will also be invited and asked to develop their specific faculty data policies and why it's important because these faculty policies will define the roles and responsibilities at the faculty level and will be able to reflect disciplinary differences we don't want to have empty documents which mean nothing we want something that is practically relevant to researchers at the faculty and with that I hope I have explained to you how the whole project came about why we wanted to start with the data stewardship and now I will hand over to Esther who will tell you about key principles behind the project thank you Martha so the key principle of the data stewardship program is to place the research and the researchers needs at the center so data stewards are there to support researchers in practicing good research data management and they are not some sort of police that ensures compliance with policies or funder requirements so instead the objective of the program is to achieve cultural change and not compliance so with research and researchers at the center of the program it became clear that disciplinary specific support is key to facilitate good data management practices therefore since the end of 2018 each faculty of TU Delft has a data steward with a similar research background to the researchers of the faculty that they are supporting so that means that all data stewards have a research background with a PhD in a relevant subject area so that they are able to speak the same language as the researchers and in addition to that research background data stewards also follow relevant support training and you can read more about these support trainings on the blog that we posted on the open working website you can find the link below on the slide so what is it that data stewards do and what type of support are they offering so data stewards are the first point of contact for researchers and they can answer any questions that researchers have regarding data or software management so most of the questions that come in can be answered by the data stewards but if they're more specifically related to ICT legal or library services the data steward will refer the researcher to the specialists and so this point of contact is very important because it can be unclear for researchers where they need to go with their questions and by contacting the data steward they will always find an answer to the question or they will at least find the person that will be able to answer their question so my day can actually be very variable so as a primary contact point we answer questions about data storage data archiving and we help with writing of data management sections and paragraphs for research projects and this includes estimating budget costs for data management from the proposal stage as well as later on and we are also contacted with questions about compliance with funders and journal policies in turn we are also in contact with researchers about the construction of the faculty policy on research data management so the policy that Marta described earlier and by contacting researchers about this policy we will be able to implement their feedback and make the policy a relevant and useful document instead of just some pages that no one will actually look at and we also play a supporting role in data management discussions so these discussions are about what data to keep what data to throw away what data should be opened up for the public and we are involved in improving the current information that is available on research data management on the website etc and we play a role in setting up workshops and trainings that are tailored to the researchers needs so these can be very faculty or department specific and by performing all these tasks data students create awareness for data management and they show the added values of good data management practices so that ends the discussion of the key principles behind the project and now we will further hear from Marta about the key challenges of the project before I take over with some of the challenges and the future outlook of the project. Thank you Esther for explaining what you're doing as a data steward there will be of course more opportunities for you to ask questions to Esther at the end about her role if you're interested but now let's talk about the challenges because we talk about this as a beautiful story but it's not always easy there are some challenges associated with the project and we will both try to be as open as possible with you about those challenges so that you can evaluate what are the pros and cons of running such a big endeavor and if you have any questions we would of course do the best to be able to answer your questions as openly as possible so first of all one of the important things we really needed to do is to make sure that we act as data stewards as the whole data support team as a team not as bunch of individual or individuals or not perhaps as the central team you know against the data stewards we have to make sure that we all share the same vision that we all see how our individual roles and responsibilities contribute to the bigger picture to the bigger goal of ensuring that data management practices at the adult are improving so a team is not a group of individuals so we had to that was part of my job is to make sure that we have important peer support network among the data stewards especially when you think about this these are people who just started their work as a data steward there was no data steward before the faculty suddenly you start as this whole lonely person at your faculty with no peer support network so for us it was quite important that we can help each other that data stewards have somebody to turn to so what we have created is we have weekly meetings of all the data stewards team which is also joined by appropriate colleagues from the central data support team and of course this depends what the discussion topic is the appropriate person would join so we make sure we have constant information exchange and during those weekly meetings data stewards often raise issues that they've encountered while working with researchers at the faculties or perhaps with the support staff at their faculties and all together we try to solve them in addition we have also created a slack channel so that's I think actually our first line of support for any urgent queries and you can see as they're nodding probably she can tell you more about this but I guess what is quite important for us that people don't feel lonely that we think like there is somebody that can help me with those questions and depending of course on the nature of the questions it can be for example that a data steward who doesn't because faculties differ in their in the type of research being done in some of them for example there is lots of work with personal data some other faculties might not be so intensively working with personal research data so very often there will be a question what do I do with these kind of interviews how do I anonymize them and then we try to really help each other and if we don't know the answer contact yet other experts from the central team or from the legal team and so on and so forth and what is also quite important is to ensure that we provide sufficient personal and professional development opportunities so for example make sure that data stewards can develop and grow in their roles but also join external networks so for example go to conferences meet colleagues from other universities develop their horizons but make also sure that they get the appropriate training that they need and chances to grow and grow continuously in their role so that's something that is quite important I guess for my role as a coordinator to make sure that we all are part of the team and are happy as part of that team and another challenge is the recruitment in retention so as Esther pointed out data stewards are people who have research background so they are disciplinary experts on top of that they are interested and deeply passionate about open science and data management issues and even more importantly they are really excellent communicators and I have to also say politicians very often data stewards would have to navigate between different requirements between different demands from different people within faculties and outside who might sometimes have some conflicting expectations of what their job is what they would like them to do so this requires a lot of political tact and then you think about this we are hiring a researcher somebody who did a PhD beforehand so how do we find the right person who has got all these qualities in one one single person so that's a challenge you know to find the right people and I unfortunately I have no recipes for success how to find the right person I think we've been quite lucky at TUDEL but that has been quite a lot of work and I have to say that for two positions we had to advertise the job twice to be able to find the right person I think sometimes it's better to wait a little bit to make sure you find the right person then to start with perhaps somebody who doesn't really fit the team or perhaps you would think you would not be able to do the job and the other question is how do you retain these people so you know now we have those data stewards who are as I mentioned disciplinary experts passionate and knowledgeable about open science and data management excellent communicators and politicians and at the same time more and more universities would like to have data stewards in place or perhaps expand their data support team so how do we convince our wonderful amazing data steward that it's worth staying in Delft that's quite a challenge I have to admit and we also have to think up in more holistically about job profile for the data stewards for appropriate career progression how do we make sure that being a data steward is actually officially recognized by colleagues from HR as a job as a profession what kind of salaries those people should have so we don't compete with each other for those excellent people that we have but that we can collaborate together and learn from each other's experience and expertise and also collaborate within other with other universities so that's one of the challenges and the third challenge actually I would like to talk about is the costs so when you think about the fact that data stewards come with a PhD degree for us that was quite necessary to at least give them the post-accelerary so if those people have earned a degree we hire them because of their expertise qualification because all of that you know years of research that they've done we have to reward them appropriately but then at least for that's the Dutch salaries so some of you might be a bit afraid we pay a lot of taxes in the Netherlands since the salaries are a bit higher I think and the costs of life are perhaps a bit higher but a salary a yearly salary for a postdoc together with the add-on costs so the pension and so on is 65 000 euro per year so that's for one full-time employee so if you multiply it by eight you end up with half a million euro per year just to maintain the salaries of data stewards and this budget of course does not include the costs for like conference attendance for training for any of those expenses so that's quite costly and that's something that you should probably keep in mind once if you want to start a similar initiative and another challenge before Esther takes over and starts to reflect about effectiveness of the project is that very often that's in a way us becoming the data stewards becoming victims of their own success people think that if there is a data stewards helping with data management they would like to take them you know use them to help them with their workflows and daily data management practices and that's great that's nice that there is such an enthusiasm but we have been receiving growing number of requests for data stewards or can you please come and work with our research group two days per week three days per week one day per week unfortunately just because we have only one data steward per faculty and Esther can perhaps say she's quite overworked with all the different requests she is receiving we unfortunately have to say no to such requests so a data steward is working at the faculty level they help with policies with workflows of the faculty level they provide training at the faculty level they do advocacy they help the whole faculty to build their capacity to support researchers in data management but they can't provide sufficient resources they don't have simply enough time to be able to support every research group at couple of days time per week would have to have like maybe 20 data stewards per faculty so what we are trying to advocate now the researchers budget in the grant proposals for dedicated data managers they could work with them on a group level perhaps at a departmental level of course depending how big a demand is for data management and be there in the faculty on top of a data steward but provide more dedicated support so really help them with day-to-day data management practices so we need both but we do have to manage people's expectations and stress that data steward can't stay with you and work with you at the one day per week ratio because they have other jobs to be done and now Esther would explain about the cultural change so another challenge is to see whether we are achieving cultural change and a big question in this challenge is how do you measure cultural change in order to see whether you're achieving it so do we count the number of data sets in the archive or the number of DMPs that are written by researchers so at TU Delft we took a different approach by setting out a survey in 2017 which was run at all the faculties and here you see the results of one of the questions and you can actually find all the results and questions of the survey by following the link below on the slide that will bring you to the blog on our open working website and so one of these questions was whether the research is automatically backed up and as you can see up to 50 percent of the researchers indicated that they do not automatically backup their data and so the results of this survey from 2017 will be compared to a rerun of the survey in 2019 to see if we have indeed increased awareness of proper data management and whether we have achieved this cultural change and another way to achieve cultural change was to start the data champion program in 2018 so although embedding a data steward at each faculty is important to create awareness and to achieve the cultural change bottom up community building efforts are actually essentially to fully accomplish all these goals and it's also impossible for a single data steward to have all the necessary detailed disciplinary backgrounds to understand and support all the types of research carried out in one faculty as Marta mentioned we are quite busy already so we needed support from data stewards needed support from data champions and so therefore the data champion program was launched in September 2018 and we had a kickoff meeting in December 2018 which we also wrote a blog about which you can read on the on the website and so on this slide you see that 38 data champions at the different faculties and as you can see there is at least one data champion at each faculty and their number is steadily increasing since the start of the program and the goal for 2019 is to have at least one data champion per department so what do data champions do so they are members of staff from all different levels and they all act as local advocates or mentors which is also the main requirement for becoming a data champion they have to be willing to act as an advisor to the department group or faculty members they raise awareness for data management at these local levels so at the department group or section level and they have knowledge of discipline specific management practices so what would be too much for all the data stewards to know about all these specific management practices and they are expected to attend data champion meetings that take place about two years two times that each year at the university level so that means that it's open to all of the data champions so all the 38 people you saw and we also organize meetings at the faculty department level that take place more frequently so for example yesterday I had a meeting with our data champions to see what they think of the faculty's research data management policy so and the next one will then probably focus on best practices in their departments on data management so the data champions are front runners in the software data management and they make the cultural change towards better research data management practices possible at the very local level so then what is next for the project so Marta has outlined the goals of the data stewardship program for 2019 in a blog post which you can again find on our our website and some of these goals are organizing more software carpentry workshops so we have instructors now which means that we can organize these workshops which are on basic software management by ourselves so that means we can organize a lot more so next one will be in June and then July and probably November as well so we'll have a lot to work on that and we're also working on an electronic lab notebook trial with our space and elab journal that will run for a year we are organizing coding lunch and data crunch walk-in consultation hours so that is a monthly walk-in consultation where people can come with their problems regarding software or data and where we will try our best to help them out with these problems and also as we already said the faculty research data policies will have to be constructed and come into effect by the end of 2019 and of course the data champion network will be expanded with having a data champion per departments in 2019 by the end of 2019 and we will have to rerun the survey in order to compare the results to see whether we have indeed achieved the cultural change and we're currently working on acquiring sustainable funding for the project which is quite a challenge as Marta has already mentioned and with this we would like to end with three takeaway messages so the data stewardship program was set up and is successful thanks to the support of senior management as policy developments and funding for the project are key for successful implementation and there is a balance between the available resources that your institute has and how to achieve the most with the resources that you have so what is good value for money when it comes to achieving cultural change and also a very important factor in this is setting up a great team and coordinating this team in a way that Marta has actually been doing wonderfully for the past years and add to your doubt and therefore team building and people are key to achieve cultural change and we would now like to thank you very much for your attention and please feel free to ask any questions that you have thank you thank you very much this was a lot of information lots of valuable information that I think everyone has to digest now and I see in the chat that someone seems to agree with that yes Ellen says you have data champions data managers data stewards how do you deal with possible confusion regarding tasks so I can start and perhaps Esther you can continue how it works specifically at your faculty we do for example at the university level we have come up with like a table that defines those roles and responsibilities at the due doubt rate level if that's of interest and perhaps earlier I can send you the link afterwards so you can disseminate to participants together with the link to the slide if that's okay but basically indeed you are very right it was quite important that it's clear to all the key stakeholders what's the difference between all those different roles so we actually have a little table comparing this is a data steward this is a data manager how do you make sure we don't confuse those different roles who are those people at what level do they work who pays for the salaries as well that was also an important consideration and there were some confusion of course and for example as I mentioned we've been advocating for researchers to budget for data manager in their grant applications recently have been contacted that a researcher got a grant and they have money for a data steward for the group which of course was quite confusing they used the wrong name and then some researchers might be confused how do I find the data steward and they would contact the wrong person so we had to then talk with those people to make sure we called that person differently which we managed to succeed but that's a very important point that we are clear about the roles and responsibilities and wherever we can we do explain those roles and responsibilities to the different stakeholders. Esther would you like to add something? Yeah I think that's already a very good answer to the question and also in practical the tasks are actually quite different between the data champions and data stewards as in there's hardly any confusion about that because people don't contact the data champions for example to write their data management plan so that's clearly an action that data stewards are responsible for but whenever someone I mean people from their group can still contact me with very specific issues but then I will also be more likely to contact the data champion to see whether they have an answer before I try to find out the answer myself etc so in a sense it's also very much about working together and trying to not burden the data champions with any issues that I could actually resolve because of course data champions are not getting paid for their efforts so there are researchers that do this in their free time so it's also important that they are not overwhelmed with new responsibilities etc which I could actually take care of and I haven't really gotten any data manager questions yet so I haven't been asked to work for not yet so I have no specific experience with that. Thank you very much, thank you very much for the answer I can't see the name someone asks is it easy for them to work together by them do you mean the managers and the stewards? But if you mean data champions and data stewards there's no conflict because we both want the same thing actually so in a sense we as data stewards we're more facilitating the interests of data champions and thereby raising awareness because they are then able to yeah act on these interests and support others as well so then you get sort of a key chain effect in sense of data managers is also it's a different work field so you could see it as the three separate boxes that Marta showed earlier for the library and TU Delft etc we all have different tasks and responsibilities and it's probably a good idea to publish a blog about this using that document to ensure that there's no confusion and in the end we all want better research data practices so it's really I haven't felt tensions or conflicts in these situations. Thank you Valentina asks in your own experience what is the key factor in raising awareness of data management needs in scientists that don't recognize those needs or are particularly reluctant to recognize the usefulness of improving research data practices? Yeah yeah I think that's it. So I think everyone recognizes the needs but they're sometimes scientists are fearful to express those needs or they're not entirely sure what those needs are until you explain to them what you can provide and sometimes there's also a bit of confusion as in they think that all we want to do is for them to open up their data and in a sense yes I would really like for them to open up their data but it's more important that they feel supported in doing this so I will have to listen to their their reluctance why are they reluctant to practicing good data management and in most situations they are not they just don't fully understand what is being meant and how should they do this and in general even with very reluctant researchers I find that if you take the time and you listen to them and you answer all their questions and you try to find a way to support them specifically they are very happy and they feel supported and then they're actually a step closer to at least improving their data management practices and perhaps not ready to open to fully open up all their research and their data but that will maybe be a next step that you can take in the next meeting so it's really about incremental steps in that sense and I hope that answers. I just wanted to say that I completely agree with Esther and sometimes you know you have really diverse needs you have people who are really excellent and perhaps asking for advice which repository might be better to publish certain outputs or Esther recently had a question about you know what are the preservation policies of one of the discipline specific repositories where they wanted to share their data with so very you know people who already are doing the excellent thing but just want to go a step further but you would also have people who store their data on usb sticks believe me and of course we have to just our advice depending on where the people are to make sure that they are not afraid look we can help you give me a usb sticks we'll help you to make it better use this support you know use this project drive we'll help you to create this you know it will be so much easier for you and they're grateful you know you do help them with little things and they start seeing the value yeah and the people are in general just very happy that they don't have to look for the answers themselves and that there's someone there to hold their hand in a sense and to set them up because researchers really do not have the time to look up preservation policies or what is meant with this question exactly what is fair because that is that is also it's not very well explained anywhere and if they have to look this up that might take them 15 minutes which they can spend doing actual research or writing a paper and that is where most of the reluctancy comes from they're they're just very stressed and they don't have the time to to organize it in this sense and if they think there is a lot of time and work yeah they may be reluctant but then if you explain that in the end it will save them a lot of time and work they are willing to listen yeah that's that sounds great someone asks says thank you very interesting could you give us more information about how we could support the RDA values for money that's interesting so I guess it really depends on your institutional context you know to support value for money it depends on as we described beforehand I guess we're quite lucky to delve because the openness principle and the importance of that wasn't a question so that was relatively easy to get our senior management aboard to be able to invest some resources in this initiative and that's that's quite important for us and that helped us to achieve a lot but of course not every institution will have the same resources and maybe I can introduce a project that I'm actually doing together with Eli that's part of research data alliance where we try to collect case studies from various institutions on what do they do to engage with their researchers and what is important in there like how much money does it cost how much time to start that initiative and how effective this initiative is in the long term and for example I mentioned the data stewards we've been talking about this today we talk about data champions but there are numerous other institutions I'm sure all of you as the attendees of this webinar you have different tactics to tactics to engage with your researchers I have heard for example from colleagues at Lancaster universities in the UK where they organize data conversations where basically researchers come to talk to other researchers about what do they do with data so that's very informal researchers talk to researchers the only thing that the library does is to organize the meeting advertise the meeting can provide pizza but the meeting itself is run by researchers so that's a very easy way to build community around those issues which costs perhaps less money you know to just provide pizza once a month then to hire a person whether that's as effective perhaps not because you have to reach all the individuals and I guess the data stewards can really knock on people's doors and there was the question before how do you convince the people who are perhaps reluctant and as Esther said those people who don't proactively come to the data steward you need to approach them yourself so that this data conversation wouldn't solve that problem but of course depending on what kind of resources are available you might want to use different approaches and at the project we are doing with Ellie we hope that the deliverables will be available in the autumn next year we want to write all those case studies into a textbook so watch out for that and hopefully we'll be able to give you some more inspiration and different kind of tactics you might use which are maybe more appropriate to your budget and what kind of resources you have available thank Marta I've just pasted the link I hope everyone can see this it's in the chat so if you want to contribute it's open it will stay open for one month I think so you have time and let's see other questions I uh someone says I understand that library has to be in the middle on the time to support their collaboration indeed I think that's quite an important point because as I mentioned before the importance of a team building that's actually a challenge as well because you have to do a lot of talking you have to have the time you have to think about how do you support the people and even though I would say I'm a dedicated person to support the data stewards to build the communication with the research support team that's never perfect that can always be better I can see lots of room for improvement but that's a lot of time investment to make sure that we are all happy with our roles so indeed I think the role of a coordinator the role of the library you know making sure that you that all the people on the project share the same vision is quite important and also I did not speak about this today but one of my role and also my boss's role it's also to make sure that other service providers across the university so for example the legal team the human research ethics committee the IT team we all work together to provide good data management services so I just spoke today about the data support part of that and the data stewards and the library because that was a topic of today but of course it's quite important that the team building also happens with people who are outside of that core research data support team and a certain example perhaps I can mention most of you would have heard about the GDPR the new European regulation for general data protection at the beginning of death we were a bit unsure what to do how to do with all that new requirements but actually that was extremely helpful for us to align our workflows for data management plans with those workflows required for researchers to perform something called DPIA data protection impact assessment and also our ethics committee approval so basically while filling a data management plan researchers are also prescreening their projects whether they need to have an ethics application or whether they need to get some specific advice on their data management from the legal team so we really try to work together to provide coherent advice to researchers I think many people many librarians in the call agree with you on that because we we see the importance that the library plays in these initiatives but not everyone sees it and trying to see if we have another question can I can I disagree with you here that the library is the most important in data management support I would I would not say most important I think we're all at the same level because without the connection to each faculty and to the researchers you don't know what it is exactly that you're supposed to be doing at the library and without having the library I would not have the facilities or the backup or the expertise to help the researchers so I would I would not state it as the library is more important or data stewards are more important I think it's really we all play more in this and library some of this library means the central point of support of open access so in the library we support lots of different we provide lots of different kinds of research support we provide support indeed there's the central team supporting researchers with data management but it's not like data stewards with day-to-day practices they mostly manage for example the the research data archive so the place where researchers will be able to persistently store their data create DOIs and so on and so forth and at the library we also oversee various training provisions for data management but these are the things that we need to do at the core that wouldn't be fair or that wouldn't be a sensible expectation of a data steward these are the problems which are common for the whole university so we address them from the central team and then of course in that that's the data team but of course we do have colleagues in the library who also provide support for open access to publications who do the negotiations with publishers about the new deals or we also have colleagues who develop open education materials for example MOOCs some courses and we all work together so as within the library and also together with the data stewards there is constant flow and of communication and indeed sometimes a data steward will receive questions about publications they are not the experts on open access to publication the expertise is research data so often they would then contact a relevant colleague in the library to provide advice on open access to publications but yes indeed the library is overseeing all these different aspects of research support and sometimes I'm able to answer questions myself is there if they're more in general or I'm actually really interested in open access and open science so most of the questions is like what should I do with my preprint what should I do with my postprint how does this work etc I can also answer but then if it comes more specifically copyright agreements etc then I would of course go to the library and knock on the door and ask for support because we don't know all the answers to the questions really we are contact points in that sense yes I think that's what the main the conclusion is that this is a vital aspect as liaisons of between the different stakeholders in the institution and I don't see other questions but I have one or two myself so I'm thinking of cost effectiveness of this and did you think that data stewardship could be part of a broader approach like a national part of national policy like more centrally organized what do you mean do you mean whether we should be providing let's say data stewardship support like data steward who could help a different institution is that your question yes and in different disciplines but centrally I think to be honest with you I would have mixed opinions I think having this disciplinary network could be helpful and it could be helpful let's say and it would be interesting to see Esther's comment on that I guess for them to have some more you know disciplinary experts that data stewards could have could share their you know problems possible solutions with so let's say if Esther is the data steward at our faculty of applied sciences at the adult maybe she would like to connect with other data stewards doing the job with similar kind of disciplines at another university but to be honest with you I think what was our main value of providing data stewardship support because at the same time you might say why didn't we install data stewards at the library and then you know just coming to researchers on request I think the core thing is that a data steward is based at the faculty so they have the offices their researchers know them that's the recognized face that's the trusted individual these are the people who get to know the people who also would not request support otherwise because either they don't think they have the problems or data management is something that they're reluctant to so I think the key benefit for us at least to have these data stewards it's actually that they are based at the faculty not even at the central university so I would have difficulty imagining that kind of support being based at the national or international level to be honest yeah so I think it's quite complicated to do it at a national level and to do it interchangeable like that because even within one institution there's already a lot of difference of opinion on what it is that we should be doing or how we should be doing it etc because even here at the faculties and having the eight data stewards we're not all doing exactly the same thing and that's it might be because our disciplines are slightly different but I think it's mostly just because one building contains a lot of people and they just have a different way of viewing things but that doesn't mean that I'm not in contact for example with people within the Netherlands that provide support for similar backgrounds actually I will provide a workshop for one of these institutions at the end of the month in order to also exchange practices and be able to help each other out etc so in the future they might be able to help myself with some of the discipline specific issues that I have at my institute etc but I think it really depends on the vision of the institute what what the idea is behind the data stewards but yeah any discipline specific information we can of course exchange and help each other out and then there's also what is happening here in the Netherlands at least and probably also more internationally speaking with RDA etc yes I see thank you very much I'm conscious that it's 12 o'clock well in Greece it's 12 o'clock and we are just on time I just read a very good point in the chat the conclusion has to be collaboration and I totally agree and I'm sure that everyone agrees and this is the whole point and one of the major issues of open science it's all about collaboration and how we all can collaborate and exchange knowledge and yes and work with each other to improve things and to move things forward and I would like to thank you very much for Esther and Marta and Esther for your time and your thorough explanation of things you talked about I think most of the most of the issues the major issues that are vital for the data stewardship and subject and yes thank you very much and see you soon thank you bye bye