A named individual or role accountable for the day-to-day execution of a DMP's commitments, typically distinct from the principal investigator and reported in the DMP's contributor metadata.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 21 May 2026

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A 'Data Steward' contributor identified by ORCID listed against each dataset in the DMP.
Is an instance
An institutional embedded data steward named on all department DMPs.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
The principal investigator (a separate role).
Not an instance
A repository service (a host, not a steward).

Editorial commentary

The data steward role bridges research practice and infrastructure. Stewards organise deposits, maintain metadata, liaise with ethics boards, and update the DMP itself. The RDA Common Standard's 'contributor' entity supports recording stewards by ORCID with a controlled 'role' value drawn from DataCite contributor roles or institutional vocabularies.

References

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

Also known as

DMP data steward · RDM steward

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Data steward role (in DMP)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-steward-role-in-dmp" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-steward-role-in-dmp",
  "name": "Data steward role (in DMP)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-steward-role-in-dmp",
  "description": "A named individual or role accountable for the day-to-day execution of a DMP's commitments, typically distinct from the principal investigator and reported in the DMP's contributor metadata.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/machine-actionable-dmps#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/data-steward-role-in-dmp",
  "sameAs": [
    "DMP data steward",
    "RDM steward"
  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-05-21T02:22:48",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

Referenced across the research world

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