A Competence Matrix for Data Curation

In recent years, the topic of research data management (RDM) has increasingly become one of the focal points of competence development for researchers. Thus, there are now a variety of training and education opportunities that are designed to enable and advance FAIR data management of research data. Due to the origins of primary research data, the majority of measures focus on enabling re-searchers to handle research data appropriately in the first place.

So far, however, little attention has been paid to those who deal with data curation in research data centers on a daily basis and thus make an essential contribution to enabling a sustainably FAIR handling of research data. For this reason, our working group from KonsortSWD (“Consortium for the Social, Behavioural, Educational and Economic Sciences” by the National Research Data Infrastructure Germa-ny) is concerned with the dedicated competence development in the area of curation-specific RDM of employees in research data centers. For this purpose, we are creating a platform that will provide both an information portal and a training center with RDM topics for data curation.

These services will be based on a competence matrix for data curation that we have designed and along which our services will be structured. The systematic inclusion of such a competence matrix of-fers various advantages: for example, the offers from the training center can be assigned very specifi-cally to individual competence areas. Additionally, learning objectives can be formulated and subse-quently evaluated more easily.

The core of the presentation will be the introduction of the competence matrix as well as its ad-vantages related to the development of curation-focused RDM offerings. It will be shown that we can use the matrix to fill a gap in competency development for FAIR, sustainable and effective RDM in the field of data curation.