Developing Guidelines for Research Data Management Counseling Services - A Community Driven Approach

Research data management (RDM) counseling services are a core asset of RDM service units. The fundamental goal of these services is to guide and support researchers in the han-dling of research data through the whole research data life cycle. Several generic and domain-specific RDM service units are already present at universities and other research institutions. Furthermore, nearly every consortium of the national research data infrastructure (NFDI) has or is planning to establish a RDM helpdesk, offering RDM-support to researchers focusing on different research fields, data and methodological questions. The organization and realization of these counseling services depend on different aspects e.g., competencies of the counseling staff, institutional mandates and general conditions or the integration of the services into larger structures like federate initiatives for RDM or NFDI consortia. In any case every RDM support unit generally offers the same counseling service. Some of them have already described, analyzed and formalized their RDM counseling services [1], [2], [5], [6], [7] but a standardized form and quality criteria of such services have not been developed yet. In fact, best practices are yet to be defined by the RDM counseling community. In our talk, we will present guidelines for research data management counseling services [3] that were developed by a group of authors of the GO UNITE! network. The authors work (or used to work) in the area of RDM counseling and had already years of experience. These guidelines are based on good practices collected and aligned by the authors. They will hopefully serve as a first reference for further developments on standardizing RDM counseling services oriented on both the researchers' RDM needs and individual requirements by RDM service units. The guidelines address different aspects like types and phases of counseling, necessary competencies but also organizational aspects such as how to organize a counseling meeting within a team, conversation techniques, trust and quality assurance are covered by the guidelines. In the chapter about the documentation of RDM counseling services, purposes for documentation are described and matched with different organizational forms of counseling services. In addition, legal aspects that have to be taken into account while documenting RDM counseling meetings are discussed, and a prototypical RDM documentation template [4] is made available. In our talk, the focus will be on the presentation and critical discussion of the various aspects identified through the guidelines. More importantly, we will engage in an interactive discussion with the audience about the possibilities of implementing these guidelines at different RDM support units. We aim to raise awareness for the importance of professionalizing RDM counseling services and want to motivate other colleagues who offer RDM counseling to participate in the further development of the guidelines. We also welcome a discussion on how the guidelines can be implemented within different RDM infrastructures e.g., local RDM service units, NFDI helpdesks and infrastructural services like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).