Data management is a community effort involving various stakeholders from diverse domains of science. Let’s define all the key stakeholders involved in a data life cycle and visualise how they can work together in a coherent way to achieve the best possible data management. In our experience, we have been working with a big consortium supported by a big team of experts and stakeholders. In smaller projects, one person has to fulfill several roles presented below. Moreover, depending on the specific tasks of data management, even in the context of a big project, the same person could assume several roles for the sake of efficiency. This might depend on the stakeholders’ skills, type of data they are managing, on how standardised the data is and if there are any bottlenecks in the data flows. Therefore these roles distributions, as well as their boundaries should be tailored to specific projects in a case-by-case scenario.

The image below represents all the stakeholders. Click on to explore the ontologies that define their role:

Image created by Daniela Ramos/EMBL

These stakeholders are involved at different stages, depending on the phase of a project. On the following page, you will find an overview of the various stages and the stakeholders involved in each one.