Is a Distributed Network of Support Staff the Way Forward? The SND Experience

During the SEADDA COST action, it was identified that many countries lack the capacity and expertise to create, manage, and share data according to the FAIR principles. SND (https://snd.gu.se/en), member of that action, had the same experience when looking at the Swedish universities. In 2018, SND’s mission was broadened to be a national research infrastructure for all research areas, resulting in the initiation of the SND network (https://snd.gu.se/en/ about-us/snd-network). This happened due to the realization that without a massive increase of SND staff, the universities would have to do most of the data management/curation themselves, so research data could be shared in accordance with the FAIR principles (e.g., via SND’s research data catalogue: https://snd.gu.se/en/catalogue/search), but also to make sure that each university had the capacity to archive and manage the data. As a result, and initiated by SND, each university started a Data Access Unit (DAU), often consisting of librarians, archivists, legal advisors, and IT staff. The DAU was offered training by SND and gained access to SND’s network, where exchange of knowledge, policies, guides on good practice, workflows etc. was done. Interest groups were started, seminars, workshops and thematic network meetings were planned and offered. A few years on, the activity in the network is steadily increasing, as is the number of published research (meta)data. This presentation will demonstrate and highlight one possible way of building capacity for FAIR data sharing and reuse.