Research professionals should not be split into two categories, say Marta Teperek, Maria Cruz and Danny Kingsley. [Figure not available: see fulltext.]

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Despite the increasing availability of Open Science (OS) infrastructure and the rise in policies to change behaviour, OS practices are not yet the norm. While pioneering researchers are developing OS practices, the majority sticks to status quo. To transition to common practice, we must engage a critical proportion of the academic community. In this transition, OS Communities (OSCs) play a key role. OSCs are bottom-up learning groups of scholars that discuss OS within and across disciplines. They make OS knowledge more accessible and facilitate communication among scholars and policymakers. Over the past two years, eleven OSCs were founded at several Dutch university cities. In other countries, similar OSCs are starting up. In this article, we discuss the pivotal role OSCs play in the large-scale transition to OS. We emphasize that, despite the grassroot character of OSCs, support from universities is critical for OSCs to be viable, effective, and sustainable.@en

In this paper, we explain our strategy for developing research data management policies at TU Delft. Policies can be important drivers for research institutions in the implementation of good data management practices. As Rans and Jones note (Rans and Jones 2013), " Policies provide clarity of purpose and may help in the framing of roles, responsibilities and requisite actions. They also legitimise making the case for investment”. However, policy development often tends to place the researchers in a passive position, while they are the ones managing research data on a daily basis. Therefore, at TU Delft, we have taken an alternative approach: a policy needs to go hand in hand with practice. The policy development was initiated by the Research Data Services at TU Delft Library, but as the process continued, other stakeholders, such as legal and IT departments, got involved. Finally, the faculty-based Data Stewards have played a key role in leading the consultations with the research community that led to the development of the faculty-specific policies. This allows for disciplinary differences to be reflected in the policies and to create a closer connection between policies and day-to-day research practice. Our primary intention was to keep researchers and research practices at the centre of our strategy for data management. We did not want to introduce and mandate requirements before adequate infrastructure and professional support were available to our research community and before our researchers were themselves willing to discuss formalisation of data management practices. This paper describes the key steps taken and the most important decisions made during the development of RDM policies at TU Delft.@en

The Data Stewardship project is a new initiative from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Its aim is to create mature working practices and policies regarding research data management across all TU Delft faculties. The novelty of this project relies on having a dedicated person, the so-called ‘Data Steward,’ embedded in each faculty to approach research data management from a more discipline-specific perspective. It is within this framework that a research data management survey was carried out at the faculties that had a Data Steward in place by July 2018. The goal was to get an overview of the general data management practices, and use its results as a benchmark for the project. The total response rate was 11 to 37% depending on the faculty. Overall, the results show similar trends in all faculties, and indicate lack of awareness regarding different data management topics such as automatic data backups, data ownership, relevance of data management plans, awareness of FAIR data principles and usage of research data repositories. The results also show great interest towards data management, as more than ~80% of the respondents in each faculty claimed to be interested in data management training and wished to see the summary of survey results. Thus, the survey helped identified the topics the Data Stewardship project is currently focusing on, by carrying out awareness campaigns and providing training at both university and faculty levels.

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Research data management (RDM) is increasingly important in scholarship. Many researchers are, however, unaware of the benefits of good RDM and unsure about the practical steps they can take to improve their RDM practices. Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) addresses this cultural barrier by appointing Data Stewards at every faculty. By providing expert advice and increasing awareness, the Data Stewardship project focuses on incremental improvements in current data and software management and sharing practices. This cultural change is accelerated by the Data Champions who share best practices in data management with their peers. The Data Stewards and Data Champions build a community that allows a discipline-specific approach to RDM. Nevertheless, cultural change also requires appropriate rewards and incentives. While local initiatives are important, and we discuss several examples in this paper, systemic changes to the academic rewards system are needed. This will require collaborative efforts of a broad coalition of stakeholders and we will mention several such initiatives. This article demonstrates that community building is essential in changing the code and data management culture at TU Delft.

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