Breaking down silos: UCL's data professionals gather for Research Data Stewardship Community launch

UCL's new Research Data Stewardship Community unites data professionals to enhance research data practices, share resources, exchange expertise and build partnerships.

Academic research has an ever-increasing need for data, and lots of it. This means researchers often must create, manage and analyse complex datasets. Many challenges can arise throughout this process, notably including:

• Errors in collection or creation
• Safe storage
• Making data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable)

These challenges are increasingly managed by dedicated teams of data professionals known as research data stewards. They play a crucial role in ensuring that data accurately represents the phenomena it aims to capture throughout the data lifecycle.
They could be involved in research governance, deciding how to optimally structure and label datasets, handling ethical concerns such as anonymising data and confirming that the necessary time and resources are properly costed into a research grant.
They may write software to clean datasets, perform quality assurance checks, and transform data into analysable formats, ultimately preparing "research-ready" datasets and supporting researchers with analysis and insights.
Treating data as an asset, they are responsible for updating and maintaining data across an organisation’s changing software and hardware, as well as controlling access, permit continued use and preventing corruption or loss of data.

Many existing staff across UCL have data stewardship responsibilities. This motivated a group made up of staff from ARC and the Centre for Longitudinal Studies to host an event launching the Research Data Stewardship Community on 6^th November 2024, bringing together these likeminded professionals. The attendees spanned a range of roles including data managers, data engineers, research governance officers and researchers in STEM, social sciences and the humanities. The commonality between them was a responsibility for managing data at some point across its lifecycle, making them all data stewards.

This event will mark the beginning of many more to follow. Brainstorming and workshops in small groups (followed by drinks, snacks and informal discussion) enabled the community to identify the shared challenges they face and develop collaborative roadmaps to overcome them, as well as bond with each other.

“Expertise in data stewardship and governance is becoming increasingly important to academic research, so it is imperative that data is managed, stored and used as effectively as possible.

Lacking a clearly defined career path, many were self-taught and their primary motivation for attending was to learn from the experiences of others. There are numerous unexpected ways in which insufficient data management can negatively impact research. Sharing experiences working with different tools, various approaches to recurring issues, and data management horror stories, the community has begun and will continue to help each-other grow and develop in their data stewardship roles.

Through online discussion and in person events, the community plans to provide a forum for discussing career pathways. A key point raised at the event was a lack of recognition of the importance of their role in academic research. An attendee remarked that they would have to lead with a worst-case scenario to convince principal investigators of the need for thorough data management planning for research projects. Many believed that there was a lack of awareness of data-related issues amongst academics, contributing to the lack of recognition for data roles and to recurring problems with data in research projects. To address this, some suggested giving mandatory training in data management best practices to PhD students.  

Currently a small team or individual is often responsible for the security of valuable data for a research project. Their concerns are frequently not properly considered when the wider team is unaware of what goes into maintaining datasets and the systems they are held in. Centralising all the relevant knowledge in a single person is less than ideal, especially if they move to different projects and handovers fail to transfer all the information needed. With no standard in place, storage of data is often unique to each project. This community presents a great opportunity to distribute knowledge, network and recruit from, and work towards setting working standards that will extend across UCL and potentially beyond.

Expertise in data stewardship and governance is becoming increasingly important to academic research, so it is imperative that data is managed, stored and used as effectively as possible. One attendee stated that “Older datasets are becoming more valuable; we can do more with data now than before.”

If you’re a data professional wanting to expand your network, get advice from experienced colleagues and help shape the future of your career, UCL’s Research Data Stewardship Community is the place for you. You can access the Research Data Stewardship Community of Practice webpage for more information here.