Celebrating 10 years of RDNL!

2023 marks 10 years since the offi­cial estab­lish­ment of RDNL and we are excit­ed to cel­e­brate and look back at the partnership’s achieve­ments over these years. What hap­pened in those 10 years and how can we move for­ward into anoth­er excit­ing decade?

What is RDNL?

Research Data Nether­lands (RDNL) is a nation­al coali­tion of data ser­vice providers and exper­tise net­works. It was cre­at­ed to pro­mote FAIR imple­men­ta­tion and reuse of research data, includ­ing sus­tain­able data archiv­ing. The coali­tion was found­ed in 2013 by 4TU.ResearchData and DANS and was lat­er joined by SURF in 2014 and the Dutch Tech­cen­tre for Life Sci­ences (DTL) in Feb­ru­ary 2022, respec­tive­ly. 

This strong part­ner­ship facil­i­tates knowl­edge exchange and capac­i­ty build­ing across all domains of sci­ence, and pro­vides exper­tise and train­ing in the field of data man­age­ment, FAIR imple­men­ta­tion and long-term data acces­si­bil­i­ty and preser­va­tion. The RDNL part­ners thus are geared to strength­en the Nation­al Pro­gramme Open Sci­ence, and help cre­ate a FAIR research ecosys­tem.  

RDNL History

The part­ner­ship start­ed at a time when ‘data’ got a lot of trac­tion: as their dowry, the ini­tia­tors con­tributed a train­ing for so-called ‘data librar­i­ans’ as well as a nation­al research data prize. It may be hard to believe that this was before the emer­gence of the FAIR data prin­ci­ples or the cur­rent world­wide sup­port for rewards and recog­ni­tion. How­ev­er, RDNL has its roots in pre­serv­ing research data for the long term in a trust­wor­thy way. Data were – and are – con­sid­ered as valu­able in their own right, not just as sup­ple­men­tary to a pub­li­ca­tion.

Soon the intend­ed audi­ence of the train­ing was broad­ened to ‘data sup­port­ers’: every­one who sup­port­ed or want­ed to sup­port researchers with man­ag­ing their data, whether they were called librar­i­ans or infor­ma­tion spe­cial­ists, or ‘even’ researchers. Thanks to this inclu­sive approach, major con­tent updates over the years, and scores of inspir­ing expert speak­ers, the train­ing became and remained very pop­u­lar.

More than 500 data pro­fes­sion­als have par­tic­i­pat­ed in our face-to-face train­ings in the Nether­lands and abroad. We were very flat­tered when the Dan­ish RDM Forum invit­ed us in 2016 to come over and give a tai­lor-made train­ing for their col­lab­o­ra­tion. “We” includ­ed Ellen Ver­bakel from 4TU.ResearchData, now retired. In RDNL’s pool of knowl­edge­able and engag­ing coach­es she stands out as the longest-serv­ing coach to date, a strong data sup­port­er her­self and a very friend­ly per­son who could assuage any con­cerns about hav­ing to write a data man­age­ment plan as an assign­ment. 

Oth­er high­lights include a nom­i­na­tion for the Dig­i­tal Preser­va­tion Award, the Essen­tials 4 Data Sup­port course being rec­om­mend­ed by Euro­pean ini­tia­tives such as Ope­nAIRE, and the course serv­ing as a mod­el for ‘Leren Pre­serveren’, which tar­gets the Dutch cul­tur­al her­itage com­mu­ni­ty. It is only nat­ur­al that the lat­ter led to a new col­lab­o­ra­tion under the Euro­pean research infra­struc­ture for her­itage sci­ence, E‑RIHS.

And what about the data prize? It evolved from one award for social sci­ences and human­i­ties to three awards: indeed, one for each the­mat­ic domain, unknow­ing­ly in antic­i­pa­tion of today’s the­mat­ic dig­i­tal com­pe­tence cen­ters, which are host­ed by RDNL part­ners.

Trainings

RDNL offers two train­ing cours­es for researchers and research data sup­port pro­fes­sion­als: 

• Essen­tials 4 Data Sup­port is an intro­duc­to­ry train­ing for those who (want to) sup­port researchers in stor­ing, man­ag­ing, archiv­ing and shar­ing their research data. 
• AVG 4 Data Sup­port is a train­ing that high­lights all con­cepts around the Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion (GDPR) and the steps one can take in the dif­fer­ent phas­es of sci­en­tif­ic research to pro­tect per­son­al data.

The Dutch Data Prize

The Dutch Data Prize is a prize award­ed to a researcher or research group that has made a spe­cial con­tri­bu­tion to sci­ence by mak­ing research data acces­si­ble for new or addi­tion­al research. The Dutch Data Prize was first award­ed back in 2010. The pres­ti­gious prize is a valu­able recog­ni­tion of researchers’ con­tri­bu­tions to their own field and to the prin­ci­ples of FAIR data. The win­ners also receive an award up to € 5.000 to cel­e­brate and make the data (even) more acces­si­ble. 

Data Prizes are award­ed in three cat­e­gories: Social Sci­ences & Human­i­ties, Life Sci­ences & Health and Nat­ur­al & Engi­neer­ing Sci­ences. Datasets pro­duced by all researchers work­ing in the Nether­lands, includ­ing inter­dis­ci­pli­nary and inter­na­tion­al con­sor­tia, may par­tic­i­pate in the Prize (pro­vid­ed they meet the offi­cial cri­te­ria). 

Over the years, the Dutch Data Prize saw many inter­est­ing wins, a few exam­ples include:

• Mate­ri­als In Paint­ings (MIP): An inter­dis­ci­pli­nary dataset for per­cep­tion, art his­to­ry, and com­put­er vision – Mitchell Van Zui­jlen, Hubert Lin, Kavi­ta Bala, Sylvia Pont, Maarten Wijn­t­jes – TU Delft, the team won in the prize in the Nat­ur­al & Engi­neer­ing sci­ences cat­e­go­ry in 2022.

MIP is an anno­tat­ed dataset of 19,000 paint­ings from the past 500 years. Its reusabil­i­ty across dif­fer­ent domains and its applic­a­bil­i­ty to the arts and human­i­ties make the dataset very spe­cial. The dataset got down­loaded over 1200 times in 28 coun­tries only 1.5 years after upload­ing it. 

• MyMovez Project – MyMovezt­Team, Rad­boud Uni­ver­siteit Nijmegen won the prize in the Social Sci­ences & Human­i­ties cat­e­go­ry in 2020.

The MyMovez project inves­ti­gat­ed ado­les­cents’ health behav­iors (nutri­tion, media use, and phys­i­cal activ­i­ty) and their social net­works for three years. The first year and sec­ond years marked the first phase of the project in which the health behav­iors of ado­les­cents were mon­i­tored with­out inter­ven­ing. The third year marked the sec­ond phase of the project in which four dif­fer­ent types of inter­ven­tions were test­ed to pro­mote either water con­sump­tion or phys­i­cal activ­i­ty. 

• BBM­RI-omics – Bas Hei­j­mans, LUMC, won the prize in the Life Sci­ences & Health cat­e­go­ry in 2018.

The BBM­RI-Omics data set was cre­at­ed to study the rela­tions between dif­fer­ent omics lev­els and devel­op omics sig­na­tures of health and dis­ease. The data set has proven to facil­i­tate researchers in their dis­cov­ery of nov­el bio­log­i­cal mech­a­nisms and bio­mark­ers for health and dis­ease. 

More inter­est­ing exam­ples and a full his­to­ry of the Dutch Data Prize can be fol­lowed in this arti­cle. 

FAIR Data Day

The FAIR Data Day is an event organ­ised by the Research Data Nether­lands (RDNL) togeth­er with the Nation­al Pro­gramme Open Sci­ence (NPOS), aim­ing to bring the research & data stew­ard com­mu­ni­ties togeth­er in the Nether­lands and award the Dutch Data Prizes. 

The first edi­tion took place on 29 Novem­ber 2022 and turned out to be a very inspir­ing and thought-pro­vok­ing day, filled with moti­va­tion­al keynote speak­ers and inter­ac­tive par­al­lel work­shop ses­sions, — all show­cas­ing good prac­tices of FAIR imple­men­ta­tion as sub­mit­ted by the research & data stew­ard com­mu­ni­ties. The Dutch Data Prize was also award­ed dur­ing the day, hav­ing received a record num­ber of 51 nom­i­na­tions! Read more about this fan­tas­tic event in the ded­i­cat­ed blog sum­ma­ry.

Looking ahead 

The grow­ing digi­ti­sa­tion of research and the tran­si­tion towards Open Sci­ence, fur­ther accel­er­at­ed by the for­ma­tion of the Open Sci­ence NL, requires prop­er stew­ard­ship of datasets and oth­er sci­en­tif­ic out­puts. In order to put Open and FAIR prin­ci­ples into prac­tice, research needs to be effec­tive­ly sup­port­ed by data pro­fes­sion­als. There is a great need for capac­i­ty build­ing of such data pro­fes­sion­als. Giv­en its expe­ri­ence with pro­vid­ing Essentials4DataSupport, a course which has been recog­nised as an essen­tial start­ing point for aspir­ing data stew­ards, we feel that RDNL can play an impor­tant role to address this need by train­ing new aspir­ing data stew­ards.  We can do that bet­ter by form­ing a broad­er coali­tion of nation­al stake­hold­ers which can help us to scale up capac­i­ty build­ing for data pro­fes­sion­als, an excit­ing per­spec­tive for the future.

We also look for­ward to many more activ­i­ties and a bright and pros­per­ous future for RDNL!