Data Stewards und Service Stewards - Opportunities for Collaboration
Creators: name: Giesler, André
name: Tatscheck, Jana
name: Niksch, Lydia
name: Bauer, Thomas
name: Ritter, Xenia
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: NFDI
Base4NFDI
Service Steward
Data Steward
Data Stewardship Goes Germany 2024

description: The German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and its Base4NFDI initiative have identified the need for a new role called Service Steward, to support the development and integration of NFDI-wide basic services into the national research landscape. Their areas of responsibility are comparable to those of Data Stewards. While they act as an interface between infrastructure and researchers, Service Stewards act as the interface between service development teams and the various NFDI consortia, thus accelerating the development of a cross-disciplinary service portfolio. This similarity suggests possible opportunities for future collaboration, as Data Stewards can benefit from being both relevant stakeholders and multipliers in the context of basic service development.

Since March 2023, the DFG-funded NFDI comprises 26 discipline-specific consortia. In general, these scientific communities operate their own service portfolios, i.e. software tools, technical services or workflows, and offer advice to enable and facilitate researchers to create and work with FAIR data. In the course of that work, cross-cutting and consortia-overlapping topics have emerged which are addressed and discussed in so-called NFDI sections. This is where Base4NFDI comes into play: as a joint initiative of all NFDI consortia, the project promotes cross-disciplinary basic services for a NFDI-wide service portfolio, providing both the development process and financial framework along with personnel support.Such a basic service usually builds on already existing service structures, creates added value for all users (compared to individual solutions), and strives for sustainable long-term organisation and provision. As a technical-organisational solution, it may offer new software, processes and workflows, computing and storage resources and personnel for development and user support. The resulting basic service portfolio can cover the entire research cycle, whereby the individual service design may vary. For example, among the seven services currently funded by Base4NFDI, IAM4NFDI offers technical cross-platform single sign-on solutions, while PID4NFDI draws on already existing PID technologies and focuses on their dissemination and the exploitation of the full potential of PIDs. The basic service DMP4NFDI supports researchers in the creation of data management plans (DMPs) with the potential help of Data Stewards and builds on the further development of the DMP software RDMO.In the development process of these basic services, Service Stewards form a communication interface between the involved stakeholders, i.a. the service development teams and the NFDI consortia. One of these communication tasks is to support the bottom-up approach of NFDI by requirement engineering and the continuous analyses of needs in the scientific communities, in order to ensure a high level of acceptance among the various target groups of the services. Therefore, their profile includes interdisciplinary expertise, complemented by focused technical knowledge (e.g. federated access, data literacy) and experience in project and service management. In contrast to that, Data Stewards are often experts in a specific discipline. They usually provide project- and practice-oriented support and give researchers advice on the selection of suitable tools and services. Furthermore, they establish, implement and refine institutional research data management (RDM) concepts. However, both roles have a supporting function.The three-phase service development process installed at Base4NFDI showcases numerous opportunities for collaboration between Data Stewards and Service Stewards. Particularly in the first two phases (initialisation & integration), which focus on exchange with the communities and the adoption of individual use cases, Data Stewards can be a valuable source of information for Service Stewards with their knowledge of the needs of researchers in their community, and can therefore also take on the role of a process stakeholder. In their bridging function between researchers and infrastructure, they have the expertise to identify relevant requirements. In the third phase (ramping-up-for-operation), in which a service is scaled up and rolled out NFDI-wide, they can support the dissemination of basic services by incorporating them into the local RDM concept, or even being part of the execution of a service. Conversely, Data Stewards and their institutions can profit from information on and early involvement in the development of the basic services. By actively participating in the process, they can help shape services to meet the needs of their community and even be use case partners or early adopters of a service, promoting the NFDI bottom-up approach. Continuing this thought, the entire research data management landscape, in particular individual institutions such as universities where Data Stewards are often located, will drive and eventually benefit from the bottom-up development of the infrastructure by Base4NFDI and the use of the basic services. In conclusion, there are several opportunities for collaboration between Data and Service Stewards. For both sides, it would offer participation in each other's fields of work, enabling mutual enrichment from the very beginning of the service development process. The practical implementation of these opportunities and the final success of the project will result from the acceptance of the basic services portfolio in the communities over the course of the project.