The Skills4EOSC Training Curriculum for Data Stewards

Introduction

Skills4EOSC ‘Skills for the European Open Science commons: creating a training ecosystem for Open and FAIR science’ is a large European project that aims to advance Open Science skills by unifying the current training landscape in Europe. The aim is to close three current gaps: the lack of Open Science and data expertise, the lack of a clear definition of data professional profiles and corresponding career paths, and the fragmentation of training resources. This poster presents the state-of-the-art of a training curriculum for entry-level data stewards developed by Skills4EOSC (Task 4.1) and offers collaboration for piloting parts of the curriculum.

Background

Data stewardship is on the rise across Europe, including Germany. Data stewards are often at the forefront of putting Open Science principles into practice. They work with stakeholders within universities to establish, govern and maintain processes to collect research data, make it usable for research objectives, facilitate its transformation into research outputs, assist in quality assurance, and support informed decision-making on its openness for reuse according to ethical, legal and social expectations. Although the need for good data stewardship is increasingly recognized, comprehensive training programs for data stewards are still lacking across Europe.

Curriculum development

Skills4EOSC is therefore developing a curriculum for data stewards that covers the basic skills and required background knowledge, and is broad enough to be adapted for use in all European countries. As part of a FAIR-by-design approach that reuses existing materials to the greatest extent possible, the curriculum builds on an existing course, ‘Essentials for Data Support’, which is hosted and delivered by the RDNL (Research Data Netherlands) and covers various topics relevant to data stewardship. In addition, we have scoped out other training materials aimed at data stewards and are incorporating these as much as possible. The curriculum currently has the following major sections:

1. Foundation

2. Research Data Management

3. Research Software Management

4. Policy and Governance

5. Usage Rights and Licences

6. Ethics

7. Personal Data and GDPR

8. Teaching and Education

9. Management and Soft skills

Each section is broken down into modules that cover specific topics. For example, in section 2 (Research Data Management), participants will delve into key principles, strategies, and technical aspects crucial for effective data management, including modules covering topics such as metadata, data curation, and data management plans. For each module, the curriculum provides learning objectives, key messages, suggested resources (in English), and instructor notes. These aspects have been collaboratively developed by international groups of RDM experts from the Skills4EOSC project. At this point, the groups have elaborated the aforementioned aspects for most modules in the curriculum and are now in the process of further refining the modules as to specific details.

Piloting the curriculum

The next step involves piloting parts of the curriculum and gathering feedback to facilitate further enhancements. We are therefore currently looking for potential partners who are willing to pilot any part of this curriculum at their institute. This could involve teaching individual modules or entire sections depending on the needs and resources at the partner’s institute. We will support our partners during their pilot and gather feedback on the curriculum’s usefulness in the envisioned final format.

Overall, we hope that, upon completion, the curriculum will become a major resource for developing training programs for data stewards in Europe, thereby contributing to the establishment of good data stewardship at European universities and other institutions.