Dutch involvement in the ELIXIR data management project CONVERGE

Slide deck for the BioSB presentation "Dutch involvement in the ELIXIR data management project CONVERGE", 16 June 2021.

Title: Dutch involvement in the ELIXIR Data Management project “CONVERGE”

1. Introduction
After the EXCELERATE project that helped build the ELIXIR infrastructure over Europe, the CONVERGE (1) project has set out to bring all 23 ELIXIR nodes together focusing on data management / data stewardship (DM/DS) processes and capacity building. ELIXIR-Netherlands is involved in several of the work packages of this project, related to the Expert Network, Training and Capacity Building and the Common Datamanagement Toolkit.

2. Approach
Our involvement in the CONVERGE project is in:
● The Data Management Network, collecting and exchanging expertise on data management all over Europe (WP1)
● Training and Capacity Building in Data Management, including a leading role for ELIXIR-NL (WP2)
● Data Management Toolkits, with a focus in The Netherlands on the presentation of the knowledge in the Data Stewardship (DS) Wizard (WP3)
● An SME event later in the project (WP4)
● We are also involved in the federated management of genetic data (EGA) through a special COVID-19 extension of the ELIXIR-CONVERGE project (WP7).

3. Results
1. The International Data Management Network meets online monthly. The Netherlands takes an active role in this network through the maintenance of the DTL Data Stewards Interest Group (2) , as well as through a Health-RI data stewards community (3)
2. In WP2, the data stewardship competency framework that has been developed in NPOS (the Dutch National Programme Open science) and ELIXIR (4,5,6) is the basis for design. development and delivery of trainings and learning paths. In addition, it has provided the basis for the “roles” that are incorporated in the RDMKit (WP3).
3. The first version of RDMkit has been released at https://rdmkit.elixir-europe.org/ ; we are working on adaptations of the DS Wizard (7) to tightly link it with RDMkit and to incorporate some of the knowledge of RDMkit in the form of the DS Wizard knowledge model.

4. Discussion
The ELIXIR-CONVERGE context provides an excellent mechanism to connect DM/DS related activities in NL to activities at the European level. In the talk we will discuss the current status of the NL contribution to CONVERGE and the benefits for NL of the CONVERGE outputs.

References
1. https://elixir-europe.org/about-us/how-funded/eu-projects/converge
2. https://www.dtls.nl/community/interest-groups/data-stewards-interest-group
3. https://www.health-ri.nl/data-stewardship-community
4. S. Scholtens, M. Jetten, J. Böhmer, C. Staiger, I. Slouwerhof, M. van der Geest, C.W.G van Gelder (2019). Towards FAIR data steward as profession for the lifesciences. Report of a ZonMw funded collaborative approach built on existing expertise. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3471708
5. Competency Hub https://competency.ebi.ac.uk/
6. Professionalising data stewardship in the Netherlands. Competences, training and education. Dutch roadmap towards national implementation of FAIR data stewardship Mijke Jetten, Marjan Grootveld, Annemie Mordant, Mascha Jansen, Margreet Bloemers, Margriet Miedema, & Celia W.G. van Gelder. (2021) https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4320504
7. https://ds-wizard.org