T L @FAIRsFAIR_eu www.fairsfair.eu /company/fairsfair Research Data Management at University of Cape Town Use case: building staff capacity and creating new training activities and organisational units as support actions for the implementation of institutional policies Type of initiative: support services and training sessions on RDM and FAIR data topics open to students, researchers and the university’s staff Organiser of the initiative: University of Cape Town (UCT) uct.ac.za Scope and objectives The Digital Library Services (DLS) of the UCT Libraries is one of the university’s departments responsible for supporting and fostering Open Science practices at the institutional level. The DLS inhabit this role as one of the stakeholders in the UCT eResearch landscape, providing a variety of services, systems and resources to ensure that good research data management is performed within the university’s teaching, learning and research activities. This includes giving recurring training sessions on several RDM and FAIR data topics and ad hoc training activities and consultations on request by different university departments. Support is also given to researchers and their support staff in using dedicated UCT infrastructures, such as the data management planning platform and the institutional data repository. Training delivered by the DLS is not limited to UCT affiliates and is open to all interested individuals from other South African (and international) institutions. Training activities are provided as support measures to ensure that students at the master level, doctoral candidates and other researchers and the university’s staff can comply with the objectives set by the institutional policy on Research Data Management. In particular, the RDM policy aims to “ensure consistent research practice related to data management principles that support effective data sharing, including open access; and the need for data to be discoverable, accessible, reusable and interoperable to specific quality standards”. Interviewees also highlighted how providing training activities to support the implementation of RDM and FAIR data practices and more broadly the transition to Open Science contribute to the broader UCT’s strategic agenda. In particular, it is crucial to define a leadership role for the university in the changing landscape of research and higher education, supporting UCT’s capacity to address new challenges and needs in the way research is produced, shared and managed in the long term. Interactions with international partners located in both the African and European continent played a key role in highlighting the need for more training activities related to FAIR research data practices. Interviewees highlighted the importance of participating in transnational fora such as the 2018 SciDataCon conference in Botswana, which was a landmark event for promoting the creation of an African community in the field of research data. Other key opportunities for building the Research Data Services at DLS have been regular attendance at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC) as well as the CODATA-RDA Schools of Research Data Science. More recently, the UCT Libraries became a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), which was welcomed by interviewees as a milestone achievement for the South African university in terms of building contacts and fostering the exchange of experiences with other institutions in the context of an established international community. The University of Cape Town implemented a range of services and training opportunities to support the uptake of RDM and FAIR data skills and practices at the institutional level. These activities are targeting students at the master level, doctoral candidates, academic staff and other researchers as well as the non-academic staff of UCT and of other interested institutions. The case study shows how needs and challenges related to the implementation of RDM and FAIR da