Abstract:

Many research institutions implement so called data stewards as a response to ever more important calls for reproducible research, interdisciplinary research and open science. TU Wien, Austria’s largest technical university, aims at bringing these topics to the future data producers and data processors themselves, namely to the students in various research disciplines. Currently, TU Wien is working on the introduction of a supplementary Master’s program that will address students of all disciplines promoting transversal skills in data management.

The goal is to include data management expertise in all domains, to raise awareness of technical and legal knowledge as well as project management skills early on and to make them an integral part of project as well as research activities. Data management and in particular open science concepts help to understand that self-generated, as well as existing, well-documented data have great potential for reuse and are highly valuable for research and innovation. The related skills will prepare students for current and upcoming demands in academia and industry and help them to ensure competitiveness on international level.

The supplementary Master’s program “Data Management” will be offered by the Faculty of Informatics to students of all other faculties, for example, Architecture, Chemistry, etc. The program, amounting to 30 ECTS, corresponds to one semester, running in parallel to an existing Master’s program in any of the disciplines offered by TU Wien, and is divided into three modules.

The first two modules will focus on:
(1) basic concepts and methods from computer science as well as
(2) data management including FAIR and open science practices.

The third module will concentrate on discipline-specific fields of application, integrating prevailing disciplinary methods and tools and integrating domain-specific courses on respective data-driven activities into the curriculum.
In terms of training data stewards, two concepts are evolving:
(1) Designing a full data stewardship curriculum to establish data stewardship as a core qualification and profession across a broad range of domains, and
(2) developing a focused training course to experts in a specific domain.

While both are needed, we argue that the latter seems to be preferable at this point in time. Only domain experts have a sufficient in-depth understanding of their data and know how to design and select the best solution for data management by taking into consideration existing good practices already in place within the given community. Additionally, it is easier for researchers to understand and accept the value of having expert support if it is provided by colleagues from the same domain.

Ultimately, only having both, highly qualified data stewardship specialists with some domain knowledge as well as domain experts with some data stewardship expertise will allow us to establish the necessary levels of communication and mutual understanding required to tackle the technical, legal, and organizational challenges emerging from an increasingly data-driven environment both in academia and industry.

As two key contributions we thus:
(1) argue for the need to establish - in addition to any comprehensive Data Stewardship training - education of domain experts on these aspects as supplement to regular master curricula across all domains and
(2) present first concepts of such a Master degree supplement program currently in elaboration at TU Wien.

Keywords:

Master’s program, data steward, data management, data lliteracy.