Introducing Ph.D. Candidates to Research Data Management in the Life Sciences: Approaches from the University of Vienna

ABSTRACT: For the past 20 years, the University of Vienna (UNIVIE)has offered Research Data Management services to its researchers, students, and support staff. More recently, UNIVIE has begun embedding Data Stewards within interested faculties. One of the goals of this approach is to provide tailored, discipline-specific support. An additional focus of this program is the education and support of the next generation of researchers. In June of 2023, the Data Stewards at the Faculty of Life Sciences and the Centre for Microbiology and Environmental Systems Science) launched a new workshop dedicated to introducing Ph.D. candidates and Masters students in the life sciences to basic research data management. This course, entitled Research Data Management for Ph.D. Candidates in the Life Sciences, employs a blended learning approach that combines instruction with a variety of activities designed to encourage students to test their skills. Students are given an online module (~4 hours) to complete before attending two in-person half-day seminars. While the online module focuses on information transfer, the seminars prioritize activities, discussions, and questions + answers. Since the workshop’s launch, the UNIVIE Data Stewards working in the life sciences have continued to hone both the online module and the in-person seminars to evaluate which approaches perform well and which leave room for improvement. In January 2024, the online module, which was written in LiaScript, and the seminar materials were released on Zenodo (https://zenodo.org/doi/10.5281/zenodo.10512974) as an open educational resource that can easily be reused and modified by others. This poster/lightning talk provides an overview of the content of the course, the lessons learned by the UNIVIE Data Stewards working in the life sciences in the past 18 months, and future directions that include the launch of an Open Science Community to facilitate more advanced and specialized information exchange.