Spotlight on the Research Data Management Working Group
This article is part of the DARIAH Spotlight campaign, a monthly series that focuses on digital scholarship within the DARIAH network. Written by Francesco Gelati (University of Hamburg) and Françoise Gouzi (DARIAH-EU), co-chairs of the Research Data Management Working Group, the article presents the needs and aims behind the creation of this Working Group back in 2020 and its development in these past 5 years.
“Five years after its foundation, the WG RDM continues to be, at least in the view of its co-chairs, a lively, albeit mostly virtual, place where early-career and renowned scholars, data stewards, digital humanists, and GLAM professionals meet in what is now the (only?) pan-European platform for sharing and discussing best practices in Research Data Management for the arts and humanities.”
Researchers face numerous (and often contradictory) demands for making data publicly available and reusable as articulated in various research policy recommendations and funding requirements. At the same time, researchers struggle with a multiplicity of factors that hinder data sharing, including those of a legal, cultural, infrastructural, and managerial nature. Although there is increasing pressure from policy makers to make data openly available, in reality, only a small fraction of datasets are reused and very few scholarly publications include references to datasets (Borgman and Groth 2024). The FAIR guidelines have been developed to address this situation to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. In effect, creating FAIR data is the overarching goal of research data management:
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