Empowering new roles in digital research
Lydia Riedl
As research increasingly relies on digital expertise, institutions must establish sustainable support structures for emerging roles such as Research Software Engineers, Data Stewards, Data Scientists, and eScientists. These roles are critical for ensuring the reproducibility, transparency, and long-term accessibility of scientific results - particularly in complex, data-intensive fields. However, despite their importance, reproducible research outputs and digital contributions are still not recognized as equivalent to traditional scholarly publications within current academic evaluation systems.
At the Open Science Retreat 2025 (#OSR25CH), experts from all these fields came together to discuss this systemic gap. The outcomes of these interdisciplinary discussions are published here.