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Last month, I had the pleasure to give the opening keynote at the 18th edition of the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC24) in Edinburgh. One of the many concerns of this age is the ability to trust information around us. Transparency is one way to promote trust, and in this sense the conference theme ‘Trust through Transparency’ struck me as both timely and relevant.

It is DANSโ€™ mission to support you in making your data FAIR. We have therefore collected a number of frequently asked questions (FAQ) and published them on our website.

On 6 March 2024, MLCommons (an Artificial Intelligence engineering consortium) announced the release of Croissant, a metadata format to help standardise machine learning (ML) datasets. The aim of Croissant is to make datasets easily discoverable and usable across tools and platforms. This is highly relevant in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) tasks on FAIR data sustainability and important for Linked Data in general.

On 20 and 21 February, the QUANTUM project kicked-off in Brussels to officially launch the start of this EU-funded data project. Within the scope of the European Health Data Space, QUANTUM will develop a quality and utility label for health data, to be used by organisations generating and hosting health data, as well as organisations providing access to health data.

Maastricht University (UM) is one of twenty- two users of DANSโ€™ DataverseNL. The Coordinator Data Stewardship Services of the Maastricht University Library, Pedro V Hernรกndez Serrano, recently posted the blog โ€˜DataverseNL: a data repository platform available to Maastricht University researchers, fostering FAIR data practicesโ€™ which we happily share.

Uniting researchers and repositories in the Netherlands, a European perspective

The paper ‘Uniting researchers and repositories to improve data FAIRness: The Netherlands in European perspective’ provides an interesting look at the Dutch research data landscape compared to the European context.

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According to LinkedIn, the profession of Data Steward is gaining popularity, ranking second in its list of the twenty fastest-growing professions of 2024. This trend comes as no surprise in the scientific community, where the importance of FAIR and open data for open science is increasingly recognised. Initiatives, projects, and communities are springing up rapidly, and universities, colleges, and knowledge institutes are increasingly appointing Data Stewards. We are also witnessing a steady rise in Digital Competence Centres.

The European Data Protection Day is the anniversary of the Council of Europeโ€™s Convention 108 on the protection of personal data. It is the first legally binding international data protection law, and is celebrated every year, on 28 January, by the 47 countries of the Council of Europe and the EU institutions. As a researcher, you are responsible for protecting the privacy of data you collect during your scientific research. We would like to help you get started on how best to do this. This article gives you a quick overview.