Wanted: Data Steward at the University Library

“Supporting your academic goals”, that is what we as the University Library stand for. We are closely connected to the academic world and within this community we are crucial for students, teachers and researchers in the digital transition. We contribute to the UM Open Science policy, the movement that increases the impact of science even more, by focusing our service on opening up and making scientific information transparent. In line with the idea of Open Science, managing research data and software according to the FAIR principles is one of the academic goals we support. The Data Steward plays an important role in making FAIR data use and FAIR software the norm for research within Maastricht University (UM).

Research Data Management (RDM) concerns all data-related activities in any phase of the data lifecycle (e.g., making a data management plan, data storage). Every UM faculty has a FAIR action plan in place, and you as Data Steward will be in close contact with researchers, data managers of research projects and PhD candidates to put these plans into practice. The main task for you as Data Steward is to facilitate researchers to store their research data securely and handle their research software in a FAIR way (video ).

Your work focuses on:

• Supporting, guiding and advising the research community with FAIR data use and FAIR software through skills support (e.g. training and workshops, providing support materials via RDM portal) and services on ‘how to use’ (e.g. crafting data management plans, submitting data in appropriate repositories). You support researchers in planning the collection, management and sharing of their data in a FAIR way.
• Developing and disseminating FAIR ways of data & software management tailored to the types of research data generated, while acting as spokesperson within the research community for creating awareness and explain the added value of good data & software management.
• Consulting on creating reproducible data-driven scientific workflows. Part of the Open Science strategy is to create research outputs that are reproducible by default. Therefore, you will guide researchers on the use of technologies for data manipulation and wrangling including the use of ontologies and vocabularies; and ultimately pinpoint how to generate FAIR research software;
• Collaboration with multiple experts, faculty based (e.g. research staff, information managers, database administrators, software engineers) and from central service units (e.g. University Library, ICT Service center, DataHub) and national organisations (e.g. SURF, NL-eScience Center, LCRDM) to support researchers.
• Following trends and developments in the field of research data, research software, linked data, research infrastructure, cloud services, and data analysis.