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Short description
In this service you are introduced to existing communities that are of interest for data stewards and researchers. For data stewards there are profession specific communities. Next to that there are communities for specific health-related domains. Furthermore, we give you a guideline on how to set up a new community or improve an existing community.
Why is it important
Research funding organisations, like ZonMw, recommend researchers and data stewards to collaborate and join or start a community within the research domain of their project. Their roles and expertise are complementary, as researchers provide knowledge about their research domain, while data stewards provide expertise on data FAIRification.
Such a community is fruitful to exchange knowledge and learn from each other, and to improve the interoperability of data within the domain by making joint decisions on FAIRification: writing FIPs, decide on controlled vocabularies and metadata schemas.
The role of a Data Steward
FAIR Data stewardship is a relatively new profession that emerged to support researchers in data handling before, during and after a research project. Data stewards are trained to make data more valuable by making them reusable for future research (and other purposes) after the project ends. They can also advise researchers on providing access to their data. Increasingly, data stewards introduce new practices to make data as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) as possible. To get a general idea on the backgrounds and experiences of professionals working with FAIR in the health domain, visit the Health-RI Data champion portfolio.
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Joining and forming communities is an important tool to strengthen the data steward profession by sharing experience and knowledge.
How to join an existing community
There are already active communities out there, some specifically for the profession of data steward and for a range of health-related domains. In the next sections we give you some examples of communities you could join.
Data Stewards and data management communities:
You can engage with your fellow data stewards via these communities:
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Institutional communities such as the Leiden University Research Data Management Community
Domain specific communities
In health research and innovation, many researchers and data professionals from specific domains come together to share their experiences and collaborate, for instance by defining FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) for the domain.
Here are a few examples of domain specific communities:
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Also, just ask around, your colleagues will possibly know of communities related to your research domain.
How to build a new or improve an existing community
For researchers who receive a research grant, it is recommended to join or start a project specific community involving both researchers with knowledge on the relevant research domain, and data stewards with FAIR data-expertise. An example of such a community is the “ZonMw COVID programme”: a data champions group consisting of the project’s PIs and data stewards. This community was facilitated by the Data Stewards Interest Group (DSIG) and GO FAIR Foundation. The community collaborated during the programme, shared experiences, learned from each other and used their joint knowledge to produce and use FAIR COVID data by bringing together their project metadata with domain specific machine actionable metadata schemes, exposed in the Health-RI portal.
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If you would like to dive deeper, the following resources will help you on your way:
Community Canvas:
Community Canvas is a framework that will help you build and run a community. It has three big sections which are equally important,
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Community building via the Data Stewards Interest Group (DSIG)
Engaging Researchers with Research Data Management: the cookbook
Manifesto for community management by the CMC (Community Managers Club)
Authors / Contributors
Jolanda Strubel
Pauline L’Hénaff
Fieke Schoots
Margreet Bloemers
Ellen Carbo
Mijke Jetten
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