Spotlight on: Diana Popa
Every other week, the Thematic DCCs and the Data Steward Interest Group (DSIG) put the spotlight on one research data steward working in the Netherlands, to stimulate knowledge exchange and peer-to-peer learning.
What drew you towards the research data management field?
My career path gave me the opportunity to “double dip” in the data management and Open Science experience, having played the role of both data professional and currently researcher with project data management responsibilities in a EU funded project.
What is an activity/task of your role that you find yourself looking forward to?
Having an interest in how the EU strategically positions itself in relation to other state or regional actors in matters of technological advancement, Open Strategic Autonomy, Open Science, research security and science diplomacy, I keep up to date with the way policies and guidelines are being developed and implemented in these regards. This allowed me to build conceptual bridges between what seem opposite and disruptive trends, while also addressing the practical challenges faced by researchers during planning and managing of research and project data.
What is something unexpected that you can offer help with, if a colleague reaches out to you?
Developing solutions for implementing research security and data management practices in a coherent manner at project and institutional levels and; translating EU level policies into actiion points at national level, feeding back into EU level policies based on gained experience and insight.
What do you think your community of research data professionals is missing?
As a data professional, I liked to characterize Open Science as a gift culture, also as homage to my anthropology professor, who in grad school explained to us the difference between economic transactions taking place in society - “gesellschaft” based on payment done at the moment of the trade in the form of hard currency and social transactions taking place in communities - “gemeinschaft” - where offerings are made without the expectation of immediate return but with the vague idea in mind that the exchange will be reciprocated at a later date in time in a form or another – gift culture. Data is shared not only for self-interest purposes of replicability and scientific integrity, but also as part of a this gift culture, where public investments in research are returned to society as a whole and to a larger context, going outside the boundaries of community that made the initial investment. I remember that this argument struck a chord with researchers during conversations on the “Why” of Open Science and data management. Also, from the side of the data professional, data management, data curation and data sharing is most often a love matter. This is observable in discussions in data management and data curation circles and also in conversations between data professionals and researchers. However, at present, hard geopolitical factors are transforming this “gift culture”, by introducing more checks and limitations to the practice of openly sharing data.
Taking the analogy of the gift culture and the EU system as a whole, this exchange or input – output relation is however skewed, with EU lead states where considerable higher investments were made in Open Science sharing more data and research outputs and Western research being overrepresented in data repositories. Western research is more prone to security risks due to its prominent position, levels of digitalisation, openness and trust that researchers have in general, as result of the Open Science programme. It is therefore more prone to analysis, critique, foreign influence and attack from threat actors and increasing researchers awareness and preparedness regarding these aspects requires more investments and more complex analyses given the maturity of the Open Science practices.
What is a topic you would want to collaborate on with others?
The balancing act of data sharing and research security
How would you like to see your current field of work evolve in the next 5 years?
To start with, the current data landscape in Europe is uniquely complex and contradicting: large investments were made in the Open Science (OS) programme in certain member states, and while uptake levels of Open Science behaviours are here also high, current shifting priorities at European level, in response to a shifting geopolitical landscape, have brought with themselves changes that have reverberations on the research activity itself. Current competing strategic agendas put a strain on researchers and research projects that have to answer to conflicting requirements. Policies such as the European Open Strategic Agenda, the 2024 EU package of guidelines addressing economic security, national level policies on knowledge security introduced new requirements that have to be balanced against the principles and practices of Open Science and data management. In a way it feels like culture clash, but one that is being approached in the European way of reaching agreement and consensus through dialogue and negotiation.
From the researcher perspective, formed behaviours on data management and Open Science are now under double points of pressure. On the one side, investments in Open Science continue, as OS aims to become “the norm” in certain member states such as the Netherlands, and funders requiring planning for OS throughout the project lifecycle and new stringent requirements being made on the side of research and knowledge security.
The data sharing – data security is not a natural love affair, on the contrary even, since each has a different focus, although for the researcher self, it is a daily lived ethical dilemma. As a researcher also, you have to squeeze and fit a research idea into pre-defined forms and workflows, whether when applying for funding of when going through institutional compliance checks. Despite tension points, Open Science, data management and research security principles and practices have to cohabitate within projects and research activities of different forms and sizes and they all have to fit in the projects palimpsest. Developing coherent narratives and workflows to accommodate these colliding trends is needed in order to take some of the burden off researchers at critical moments in the research lifecycle, such as writing project proposals, answering to compliance requirements against strict deadlines.
Get in touch with Diana: LinkedIn | Orcid
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