A Decade Of Growing Data Management Support At KU Leuven
Creators: name: Van den Eynden, Veerle
name: Barcena Roig, Ingrid
name: Philips, Johan
name: Sterckx, Kim
name: Bloemen, Dieuwertje
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: Curation infrastructure: Evaluations of existing tools and principles in data curation
Curation infrastructure: Proposals for new approaches to large-scale service delivery
Curation infrastructure: Movements in Open and Citizen Science and trust in digital curation
Education and training: What are established best practices in educating and training these groups?
RDM services
Infrastructure development
RDM policy
Institutional RDM strategy
IDCC25

description: The development of research data management support services at research institutions, is in part driven by the need for robust and high-quality research, but also by external factors. For KU Leuven, a research-intensive university in Flanders, Belgium, key external drivers were (1) the adoption by FWO - the main research funder in Flanders - of research data management requirements into their policy in 2018; (2) the European Commission mandating open science and FAIR data; and (3) the Flemish government establishing the Flemish Open Science Board (FOSB) in 2020 and providing funding to all universities to recruit data stewards and develop data infrastructure.

A first university-wide policy guideline on research data management (RDM) was adopted at KU Leuven in 2014. In 2018 an RDM Steering Group was created with three working groups, on Policy, Advice & Training and Infrastructure. In 2019 a RDM policy was adopted, focusing on high-quality research and scientific integrity. This policy further expanded in 2022 with guidelines on publishing and sharing research data.

An RDM Competence Centre (RDM-CC) was set up in 2020 with five RDM experts to coordinate the development and roll-out of RDM guidance, training, services, tools and infrastructure to support researchers with improving their RDM skills and competencies. The University’s RDM service capabilities were analysed and further developments planned using the Research Infrastructure Self-Evaluation (RISE) Framework in 2018 and 2022. This benchmarking tool is designed to facilitate RDM service planning and development at institutional level. At KU Leuven, it was used to set priorities for future developments, which then translated into annual RDM action plans.

Over the past five years KU Leuven has made significant investments in RDM, which resulted in a growing set of services and infrastructure, such as the institutional Research Data Repository (RDR) to facilitate data publishing, and the ManGO platform for managing active research data, with metadata, automated workflows and collaboration functionalities.

In this poster, we show this exponential development of the suite of RDM services, training and tools offered at our university to advance RDM practices throughout the data lifecycle (before, during and after research) over the course of ten years.

Services include a one-stop shop RDM helpdesk, review of data management plans developed by the university’s researchers, a Book-a-data-manager service for projects and research groups to facilitate implementation of practical data management actions, support to publish datasets in the institutional repository RDR, and support to develop customised RDM policies at the departmental and faculty level.

This is a joint effort by research support teams at KU Leuven Libraries (2Bergen, LIBIS, Artes and Nexus), the Research Coordination Office and ICTS, the central ICT department of KU Leuven.