Higman, Rosie2025-09-242025-09-242017Bellanger, S., Higman, R., Imker, H., Jones, B., Lyon, L., Stokes, P., Teperek, M., Verdicchio, D. (2017). Strategies for engaging senior leadership with RDM – IDCC discussion. https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=1435 (accessed 26th May 2017). Brown, C., Bruno, I., Downie, A., Frey, J. G., Haines, H., Higman, R., Hyvonen, M., et al. (2017). Presentations and notes from the Electronic Lab Notebooks event on 13 January 2017. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.7217 Chue-Hong, N., Eglen, S., Whitaker, K., Gatto, L., Teperek, M., Higman, R., Haines, H., & et al. (2017). Research software management, sharing and sustainability workshop materials. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.7178 Duca, D. (2017). What is everyone saying about research software?. https://researchdata.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/03/02/everyone-saying-research-software/ (accessed 26th May 2017) Higman, R. (2017). The art of software maintenance. https://unlockingresearch.blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=1286 (accessed 26th May 2017) Higman, R., Teperek, M., and Kingsley, D. (2017). Creating a community of data champions [pre-print]. https://doi.org/10.1101/104661 Teperek, M., Higman, R., and Kingsley, D. (2017). Is Democracy the Right System? Collaborative Approaches to Building an Engaged RDM Community [pre-print]. https://doi.org/10.1101/103895https://repository.ifla.org/handle/20.500.14598/6043The Research Data team at the University of Cambridge sits within a wider Office of Scholarly Communication and provides services including advice, a repository and regular training in Research Data Management (RDM). The team initially focused on complying with funder policies in training and information sessions for researchers. This method had limited success and failed to engage researchers, so RDM services are now provided through a more democratic approach which focuses on researchers’ needs (Teperek, Higman and Kingsley, 2017). This means that services are constantly evolving in response to feedback from researchers, and a community of interested researchers and support staff have been formed to help deliver services. There have been clear rewards from adopting this approach including improved researcher engagement, increased awareness of RDM across the University and ultimately more relevant RDM provision for our service users. However, these rewards need to be contrasted with the risks of this approach, in particular researchers going ‘off-message’ when delivering training and managing the different needs of the disciplines we serve with limited resources. Attempting to balance these needs also raises a broader tension with institutional priorities, which are focused on compliance with funder policies, and produces questions about whose needs should take precedence. There are inevitable difficulties in ‘letting go’ of control over RDM services and balancing the conflicting priorities this approach has uncovered, but the researcher engagement it has delivered suggests that this is a worthwhile endeavour. This paper will explore these issues through looking at researcher-led events on issues including software management and electronic lab notebooks.enAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Articlehttps://ifla.wdib.uw.edu.pl/open accessResearch Data Managementresearcher engagementresearch supportData Champions