In this paper, we explain our strategy for developing research data management policies at TU Delft. Policies can be important drivers for research institutions in the implementation of good data management practices. As Rans and Jones note (Rans and Jones 2013), " Policies provide clarity of purpose and may help in the framing of roles, responsibilities and requisite actions. They also legitimise making the case for investment”. However, policy development often tends to place the researchers in a passive position, while they are the ones managing research data on a daily basis. Therefore, at TU Delft, we have taken an alternative approach: a policy needs to go hand in hand with practice. The policy development was initiated by the Research Data Services at TU Delft Library, but as the process continued, other stakeholders, such as legal and IT departments, got involved. Finally, the faculty-based Data Stewards have played a key role in leading the consultations with the research community that led to the development of the faculty-specific policies. This allows for disciplinary differences to be reflected in the policies and to create a closer connection between policies and day-to-day research practice. Our primary intention was to keep researchers and research practices at the centre of our strategy for data management. We did not want to introduce and mandate requirements before adequate infrastructure and professional support were available to our research community and before our researchers were themselves willing to discuss formalisation of data management practices. This paper describes the key steps taken and the most important decisions made during the development of RDM policies at TU Delft.@en

The Data Stewardship project is a new initiative from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands. Its aim is to create mature working practices and policies regarding research data management across all TU Delft faculties. The novelty of this project relies on having a dedicated person, the so-called ‘Data Steward,’ embedded in each faculty to approach research data management from a more discipline-specific perspective. It is within this framework that a research data management survey was carried out at the faculties that had a Data Steward in place by July 2018. The goal was to get an overview of the general data management practices, and use its results as a benchmark for the project. The total response rate was 11 to 37% depending on the faculty. Overall, the results show similar trends in all faculties, and indicate lack of awareness regarding different data management topics such as automatic data backups, data ownership, relevance of data management plans, awareness of FAIR data principles and usage of research data repositories. The results also show great interest towards data management, as more than ~80% of the respondents in each faculty claimed to be interested in data management training and wished to see the summary of survey results. Thus, the survey helped identified the topics the Data Stewardship project is currently focusing on, by carrying out awareness campaigns and providing training at both university and faculty levels.

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Software and computational tools are instrumental for scientific investigation in today's digitized research environment. Despite this crucial role, the path towards implementing best practices to achieve reproducibility and sustainability of research software is challenging. Delft University of Technology has begun recently a novel initiative of data stewardship - disciplinary support for research data management, one of the main aims of which is achieving reproducibility of scientific results in general. In this paper, we aim to explore the potential of data stewardship for supporting software reproducibility and sustainability as well. Recently, we gathered the key stakeholders of the topic (i.e. researchers, research software engineers, and data stewards) in a workshop setting to understand the challenges and barriers, the support required to achieve software sustainability and reproducibility, and how all the three parties can efficiently work together. Based on the insights from the workshop, as well as our professional experience as data stewards, we draw conclusions on possible ways forward to achieve the important goal of software reproducibility and sustainability through coordinated efforts of the key stakeholders.

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