Fostering Interdisciplinary Data Cultures through Early Career Development: The RDA/US Data Share Fellowship

Openness and interdisciplinarity in research and data are among the challenges that are frequently discussed in the context of changing scientific and scholarly practices. Gradually, the visions of open and widely shared data are being reconciled with complex realities that stem from the disciplinary differences in data cultures. In this paper we discuss interdisciplinarity through data as a way to create research environments that are more flexible and, as a result, more amenable to change. We report our findings from facilitating and evaluating a data-oriented early-career fellowship program that was administered as part of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a global organization that aims to enable open sharing and re-use of data. We identify ways to foster interdisciplinary data cultures among the future researchers and professionals and propose recommendations for future programs. While the short-term early career programs cannot address the systemic factors that impact openness and interdisciplinarity, such as the systems of reward and recognition or the funding structures, they can introduce mechanisms that support diversity, learning, and leadership and, ultimately, contribute to a culture change.