RDMF17: “The road less travelled?” Research data, careers and other pathways | Digital Curation Centre

The seventh RDMF meeting, held in Warwick back in 2011, took “Incentivising Data Management and Sharing” as its topic, with presentations providing funder, institutional and infrastructural perspectives on the then-nascent discipline. More recently, Professor Les Carr’s keynote at RDMF16 in Edinburgh last Autumn touched on the sometimes fraught relationship between the ideal (i.e. the scholarly work in itself) and the more quotidian (career considerations) when he cited David Barron’s maxim that “Research is the by-product of researchers getting promoted.”

 

Six years on from the first of these events, and six months on from the latter, how – and to what extent – have data career pathways matured in the last half-decade, and what might we expect from the next five to ten years? As estimates of the numbers of data scientists that will be required to meet demand in the coming years become ever more extravagant, how well positioned is the academy to produce these, whether via formal qualifications or the development of existing staff? How do we balance and reconcile the scholarly effort involved in research data management (and software, as Research Software Engineer matures as a profession) with career progression? And how do we ensure we continue to address the concerns of different stakeholder groups, such as funders and publishers? In short, how far have we come, where are we now, and what must we continue to plan for?"