STARDAST

STARDAST establishes a sustainable, cross-sector ecosystem for professional data stewardship across Europe, supporting Horizon Europe's EOSC objectives. The project employs a practice-driven model where data stewards function as co-creators, embedded across research infrastructures, universities, and industry.

The project will develop a cross-disciplinary curriculum for data stewards, strengthen data steward skills and career pathways, support competence centres and pilot stewardship models across research, education, and industry. Beyond traditional training, STARDAST supports diverse data stewardship activities: staff exchanges, stewardship-as-a-service models, peer learning networks, mentorship programmes, hands-on consulting through embedded stewards, and data champions as local ambassadors. These activities pilot stewardship integration models into institutional policies, ensuring the sustained development of career pathways. Building on Skills4EOSC and FAIR-IMPACT, STARDAST will deliver validated training, tools, policy frameworks, and a European network to embed FAIR and Open Science practices across the research workforce.

The project pursues three long-term impacts: to establish sustainable pan-European infrastructure for FAIR and open science data practices, to improve research quality through standardised data stewardship, and to drive a cultural shift in which data curation and open science are formally recognised and rewarded within research careers.

Consortium

The consortium consists of 19 partners from nine countries across Europe from research infrastructures, universities, international organisations, industry, and SMEs. The combined expertise spans the life sciences, particle physics, linguistics, translational medicine, biodiversity, digital humanities and industry R&D all in the theme of FAIR data management and Open Science. Coordinated by EMBL, key partners include Euro-BioImaging, CERN, CLARIN ERIC, DARIAH, EATRIS ERIC, AstraZeneca, Merck, and several leading European universities and research institutes. 

Euro-BioImaging in STARDAST

EuroBioImaging plays a multi-faceted role in the STARDAST project, leading Work Package 3 on steward upskilling and community building while also spearheading cascading grant activities. EuroBioImaging also contributes to the project’s analysis of the data stewardship landscape, shapes communication and outreach efforts, supports the consolidation of modular curricula for data stewards, and strengthens connections with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) ecosystem.

STARDAST is funded by the European Union under Horizon Europe Grant Agreement No. 101268773. Views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Executive Agency.