KU Leuven

October 2025 – Link to the french version

Your institution

Founded in 1425, KU Leuven has the double honour of being the oldest university in the Low Countries and the oldest extant Catholic university in the world. It is a comprehensive university with 15 faculties offering programs in a wide range of disciplines and is located across 12 campuses in 9 Belgian cities. The institution hosts about 13 500 staff members, 64 000 students and 7 200 PhD students. In addition, KU Leuven is a research-driven university with 740 million euros of yearly research expenses, about 10 400 current researchers, 153 ERC grants and the leading Horizon Europe participant in 2023 based on grant agreements signed (284) and EU contribution received (170.3 million euros).

Since when has your service been supporting data management? How was your service structured?

The development of research data management support services at research institutions is in part driven by the need for robust and high-quality research, but also by external factors. For KU Leuven, a research-intensive university in Flanders, Belgium, key external drivers were (1) the adoption by FWO – the main research funder in Flanders – of research data management requirements into their policy in 2018; (2) the European Commission mandating open science practices and FAIR data; and (3) the Flemish government establishing the Flemish Open Science Board (FOSB) in 2020 and providing funding to all universities to recruit data stewards and develop data infrastructure. 

A first university-wide policy guideline on research data management (RDM) was adopted at KU Leuven in 2014.  At that time, only approximately 2 FTEs were providing RDM support within their broader research support roles. In 2018 an RDM Steering Group was created with three working groups, on Policy, Advice & Training and Infrastructure. In 2019 a RDM policy was adopted, focusing on high-quality research and scientific integrity. This policy further expanded in 2024 with guidelines on publishing and sharing research data. 

An RDM Competence Centre (RDM-CC) was set up in 2020 with five RDM experts to coordinate the development and roll-out of RDM guidance, training, services, tools and infrastructure to support researchers with improving their RDM skills and competencies. The University’s RDM service capabilities were analysed and further developments planned using the Research Infrastructure Self-Evaluation (RISE)  Framework in 2018 and 2022. This benchmarking tool is designed to facilitate RDM service planning and development at institutional level. At KU Leuven, it was used to set priorities for future developments, which then translated into annual RDM action plans.  Over the past five years KU Leuven has made significant investments in RDM, which resulted in a growing set of services and infrastructure, such as the institutional Research Data Repository (RDR) to facilitate data publishing, and the ManGO platform for managing active research data, with metadata, automated workflows and collaboration functionalities. More than 20 full-time equivalents provide support for Research Data Management.  Since 2020, we also provide RDM-support to the 5 Universities of Applied Sciences and Arts of the KU Leuven Association, as well as 3 partner institutions.

How do you support researchers?

KU Leuven offers a comprehensive suite of Research Data Management (RDM) services to support researchers at every stage of the data lifecycle. This includes a comprehensive and publicly available RDM website with practical guidance and tools, a responsive helpdesk, and over 40 training sessions annually, many tailored on demand. We regularly organise open RDM events, provide expert advice, review data management plans, and offer a « Book-a-Data-Manager » service for hands-on project support. Our team helps publish datasets in the institutional repository RDR, develop custom RDM policies, and extend training and support to KU Leuven Association partners and Universities of Applied Sciences and Arts.

How is data management support organized in your institution?

The RDM Steering Committee, led by the Vice Rector for Research, provides strategic direction for the RDM Competence Centre and oversees the operations of three dedicated working groups: Policy, Infrastructure, and Advice, Training & Communication. The RDM Competence Centre itself is a virtual collaborative partnership of research data management experts from central services including ICTS, the Research Coordination Office, KU Leuven Libraries, and LIBIS. It coordinates the rollout of various RDM-related projects and services, focusing on advice, guidelines, and knowledge management; ensuring compliance with funder and legal requirements; supporting documentation, archiving, and publishing of research data; providing technical infrastructure; and aligning RDM activities between KU Leuven and the University Hospital. The broader RDM support network includes both central and decentralized staff that offer domain specific specialized support for Biomedical Sciences, Science & Engineering, and Humanities & Social Sciences. Also additional support is provided for Universities of Applied Sciences & Arts within the KU Leuven Association and its partner institutions.

Present a particularly important action for your institution’s data management support.

Development of an integrated ecosystem of RDM tools @ KU Leuven 

KU Leuven decided in 2018 to create an ecosystem of RDM tools to enable researchers to manage their data well and in a FAIR way. In 2018, KU Leuven started on the road to an institutional data repository, which resulted in the launch of the Dataverse-based « RDR » in January 2022. KU Leuven RDR has since achieved CoreTrustSeal certification, as the first repository in Belgium to receive this certification.

In parallel, there was also a strong focus on tools to manage data in a structured and metadata-rich way during the research project. In this context, an iRODS instance that enables easy and integrated metadata management from the start of a research project via a self-developed portal was launched in March 2023, called « ManGO ». 

KU Leuven further supports a varied landscape of RDM tools, including OSF, GitLab, REDCap, and SharePoint. As one of the four FAIR principles is interoperability, the aim is to connect as many tools to RDR and ManGO as possible, with the connection between ManGO and RDR being crucial to facilitate easy transfer of data for publication. The future holds further work to improve ManGO and RDR as well as further and more extensive integrations between as many RDM tools as possible, by enabling metadata and data exchange where feasible. Work is also underway to launch a cold storage option for data that is not published but should be archived. As with ManGO and RDR, KU Leuven will continue to share its work in open source to ensure the investments made in RDM tool development can also be used by and is accessible to other institutions.