Highlights at member institutions

TU Delft

Among the 2024 highlights, we’d like to mention the following:

Training

• With the training team at full strength, there has been a substantial increase in the reach of training initiatives. You can read the main highlights of the team in 2024 in this blogpost.
• The Supervisor’s Guide has been released. This non-traditional training resource assists PhD supervisors in staying up to date and supporting their students’ RDM needs, supported with real-life use cases and peer testimonials on research data best practices.
• A variety of outreach and extension activities, including development of the Data Hunters card game which is used in our Personal Data course as well as in related less-formal activities.

Data Stewardship

• The Data Stewardship team updated the TU Delft Data Management Plan template provided in the institutional DMPonline instance.
• A system has been developed to send automated emails with Data Management Plan feedback requests from researchers and students in DMPonline to corresponding Faculty Data Stewards.
• The periodic review process of the TU Delft Research Data Framework and Research Software Policies started.
• Electronic Lab Notebooks are provided to help researchers document and maintain reproducibility of research and share information more easily. The user community expanded over the past year and regular user group meetings with presentations from active users took place to share best practices.

Digital Competence Centre (DCC)

• Offer reproducibility checks through Check-NL
• Developed of a new course on “Version control & collaborative development for research software”
• Welcomed 2 new research software engineers with AI specialisation

Innovation

• iRODS: piloting a new solution for active data management with iRODS at TU Delft, a collaboration between the Library and ICT innovation.

In 2024, the UT Digital Competence Center (DCC) made significant progress in embedding FAIR data and software practices into institutional policy frameworks. The university’s Research Data Management (RDM) policy was updated to reflect current best practices, clearly outlining roles and responsibilities across the research lifecycle. In parallel, a dedicated policy on Research Software Management (RSM) was developed, supported by practical guidelines to facilitate adoption by researchers.

To support the implementation of this policy, UT DCC secured NWO funding for a new position focused on open-source software training and interoperability. This role will drive the development and delivery of tailored training and information sessions for the UT research community.

The UT DCC also strengthened its collaboration with the Open Science Community Twente (OSCT), co-organizing multiple events throughout 2024, including a “Bring Your Code” workshop where participants received hands-on feedback to improve the reusability of their code and guidance on crafting effective Software Management Plans.

Additionally, two UT DCC team members became certified Carpentry instructors, enabling the university to host its first in-house Software Carpentry workshop. Following its success, two further editions are planned for 2025, with strong prospects for it becoming a regular part of UT’s training portfolio.

The Product Area Research, from the Library and Information Services, keeps growing and innovating, with the teams of Data Stewards, Research IT Consultants, Research Data Infrastructure Lab, and the SuperComputing Centre, we support our researchers with all their needs throughout their research.

In September 2024 we launched the Research Cockpit, a platform to support researchers throughout their research data life cycle.

We started with the planning phase, so we have now integrated workflows for data management plans, ethical approvals, and privacy checks. We are working on integrating legal agreements, pre-registration templates, storage solutions, HPC solutions, archive, and much more.

In 2024, the RDM Support Team published several key resources to enhance research data and software management at WUR: the WUR Software Management Plan template, the WUR Data Management Plan for MSc students, and the Yoda@WUR Data Curation Guidelines. All of these resources are available in the WUR-RDM-support community in Zenodo.

In May 2024, a new data librarian joined the team, bringing additional expertise and strengthening the team’s capacity. In October 2024, the team organised a comprehensive refresher course for 45 (new) data stewards across WUR, aimed at enhancing their knowledge of research data management practices, tools, and institutional policies. Throughout the year, nearly 300 Data Management Plans were reviewed, and support was provided for dozens of dataset publications.

The team successfully organized a new edition of the Wageningen Model and Data Day, bringing together data stewards, modellers, researchers, software engineers, model stewards, and many others for a day of collaboration and knowledge exchange. The event featured 28 hands-on sessions and attracted an impressive 205 participants.