BioMedData Deliverable D3.4 Determining Best Practices and Specific Solutions for Data Handling

Data management practices across Research Infrastructures (RIs) play a critical role in the production of streamlined Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data. It is important to assess how Research Data Management (RDM) practices are implemented to understand the strengths and weaknesses of data management services across facilities and organisations. The Norwegian landscape of life science research infrastructures involves a large number of data producers providing services to research users. The BioMedData project, an infrastructure established in 2020, brings together the RIs within the Life Sciences in Norway and aims at improving their data management practices. In 2021, BioMedData together with the partner RIs, initiated the assessment of the data management routines at the RIs to bridge gaps across the data life cycle. The assessment was performed through a questionnaire designed in Data Stewardship Wizard, addressed by the RIs, covering FAIR data principles as well as international requirements (Science Europe, Horizon2020) – the findings included a lack of community-recognised metadata standards within specific domains, and the need to apply and improve responsibilities for data management implementation within the RIs. Here, we provide a follow-up assessment that allows us to assess which RDM practices have been newly implemented or have improved over the past two years across five RIs. This report provides domain-specific findings as well as a direction towards understanding the need to streamline the processes of data production, sharing, and storage in a FAIR and cost-efficient way.