RDA Professionalising Data Stewardship IG - What does a career track for data stewards look like?

The RDA Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group (RDA PDS IG) conducted a survey as part of a programme of work to better understand the current and future perspectives of people who were/are working as Data Stewards or similar Research Data Management (RDM) roles. This is the preliminary report on the survey results.

The premise for the survey and work of the RDA PDSIG is that Research Data Management professionals, like Data Stewards, play an increasingly vital role in research practices. However, such a role has not been formally or consistently recognised as a profession in the academic system. In order to capture a wide range of participants, Data Stewards were defined in the survey as “Data Stewards aim at guaranteeing that data is appropriately treated at all stages of the research cycle (i.e., design, collection, processing, analysis, preservation, data sharing and reuse)”, even though we acknowledge that the definitions of data stewardship may vary according to different research context and research settings.