Data steward role (in DMP)

The data steward role names the individual accountable, day to day, for executing a Data Management Plan (DMP)‘s commitments — organising deposits, maintaining dataset metadata, liaising with an ethics board over amendments, and keeping the plan itself updated as the project progresses. It is deliberately distinct from the principal investigator: a PI is accountable for the research overall, while a data steward is accountable for the specific, often unglamorous mechanics of getting data management actually done, and the two roles are frequently held by different people, including a shared institutional steward supporting several projects at once.

The RDA DMP Common Standard‘s “contributor” entity supports recording a steward by ORCID iD together with a controlled role value, drawn from the DataCite contributor-role vocabulary or an institutional equivalent — which is what allows a data steward’s contribution to be captured formally in a machine-actionable DMP (maDMP) rather than only mentioned in passing in the narrative. A research office setting up a new project’s DMP should confirm a named steward exists and is recorded in this structured way, not just described informally as “the postdoc will handle the data.”

How it differs from adjacent DMP concepts

• vs. DMP review — a data steward executes the plan’s commitments; a reviewer evaluates the plan’s content. The same person can do both, but the roles are conceptually separate.
• vs. DMP component — the steward is recorded as a contributor component within the plan, not a separate structure.

References

• Barend Mons, Data Stewardship for Open Science (CRC Press, 2018); DataCite Metadata Schema contributor types.

Checking this against the current guidance

Whether a data steward has to be a specific named individual, or can be a role held by an office, depends on the funder’s own DMP requirements. The answer depends on which funder requirement you are working to,
and the page above states the general rule.

Ask
CASRAI: Is the data steward role required to be a named individual in the DMP, or can it be satisfied by naming a departmental role or office instead?

It searches CASRAI’s indexed corpus of research-administration guidance and cites
the passage behind each claim, so you can open the source and check it rather than
take its word — and it says so when the corpus does not cover something instead of
guessing. Two questions a day are free while you are signed out, no
account and no card. Everything CASRAI publishes stays free to read.

Frequently asked questions

Does the data steward have to be a co-investigator on the award?

No. The data steward role is usually a data-management responsibility, not a research role, and is often held by library or research-data-management staff who are not listed as investigators on the award itself.

Can the PI serve as their own data steward?

Yes, on smaller projects a PI often takes on both roles, though larger or multi-site projects typically separate them so that data-management responsibility does not depend entirely on the PI’s own time.

What happens if the named data steward leaves the institution mid-award?

The DMP generally needs to be updated to name a successor, since funders that check DMP compliance expect the stewardship function — not just the specific person — to continue uninterrupted for the life of the award.

Is the data steward role the same as a data protection officer?

No. A data protection officer is a privacy/compliance role required under some data-protection regimes; a data steward is a research-data-management role focused on the DMP’s data lifecycle and is not automatically a privacy or legal function.