The benefits of using Open Badges (OBs) to certify research data management skills

OBERRED will be discussed within the publication “Research Data Management for Arts and Humanities: Integrating Voices of the Community” prepared by the DARIAH Research Data Management Working Group. The section devoted to OBERRED will bring the example of our project to highlight the benefits of using Open Badges (OBs) to certify research data management skills.

In June cultural heritage professionals, researchers, data stewards, open science officers and other data support professionals/experts working in the arts and humanities domain gathered at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) in Staszic Palace, Warsaw for a two-day intensive writing sprint to work together on the publication.

Having been collaborating remotely for more than 2,5 years now, the exercise also served as the first ever face to face meeting of the working group. The drafting team arrived back home from Warsaw with not less than 155.900 characters, telling stories of how research data management has “become a thing” in policy, research support and scholarly practices across Europe; what are its special flavors in different national and institutional contexts; how certain arts and humanities institutions, workplaces of the authors, developed capacities for data support; what are the shared, domain specific challenges that all of us are facing regardless of the institutional specificities or national legislations; and what are trustworthy solutions and tools worth to be shared as part of the final output.

The event has been made possible by the third Working Groups (WG) Funding Scheme Call for the years 2021-2023 and the resulting grant administered by the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN). Participants from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, The Netherlands and of course from Poland came together partly face to face, partly via Zoom.

The Open Access publication will aim to provide practical know-how for both researchers and the new research support professionals (data stewards, subject librarians, open science officers, etc.) by bringing together case studies related to multilingualism, access to cultural heritage data, sensitive data and access management via AAI, innovative data publications, long-term archiving, or clarifying the notion of data in traditionally non-data-heavy arts and humanities disciplines. Open Badges will be part of the described landscape. The team is planning to finalize the drafting by the end of the summer and publish the collection in early 2023.

This short article uses parts of description published in a blog post on DARIAH Open (CC-BY 4.0).