The Knowledge Hub Reading Club
The KH Reading Club is a community-driven initiative that brings members together each month to talk through a shared set of readings. Now that the new policy period has started, this feels like a good moment to look back at where it started, how it works, and the road ahead.
How it works
In December 2023, a small group of RDM professionals from our network launched a refreshingly simple initiative: a monthly online gathering to discuss literature on RDM subtopics worth digging into.
Ahead of each session, we pick a handful of peer-reviewed articles and/or useful web pages and add them to a shared Zotero group library, which anyone in the Knowledge Hub can use as a starting point on a given topic. The group then talks them through together. So the club offers two things at once: a chance to exchange ideas with peers, and a library that stays available to the wider community afterwards.
We meet over the lunch break, so the sessions don't eat into anyone's core working hours. Reading the selected literature beforehand is encouraged but never required—come along, join the conversation, and share your own experience with the topic either way.
Apart from a handful of exceptions, we've kept up the monthly rhythm ever since. Along the way we've built up a solid spread of topics: data-sharing licenses, DMPs, data organization, GDPR, data de-identification, physical data management, AI for RDM, RDM assessment, data papers, and the state of the FAIR principles in 2026, among many others.
Why we keep going
The idea is to offer a low-threshold, opt-in space to slow down and think about a specific RDM topic together. In a field that moves as fast as this one, there's real value in carving out an hour to sit with the same texts, compare perspectives, and reflect a little more carefully than the average workday allows.
We won't pretend the turnout is huge: sessions usually draw between three and eight people. But small groups make for good conversation, and we're in no hurry to stop. We also know that prepping in advance is a genuine time investment that isn't always doable, so the door stays open regardless of whether you've done the reading.
And whether or not you can make it, the Zotero collection is there for you—a growing, topic-by-topic set of articles built up over the past 27 sessions. To give a taste of what these sessions look like in practice, we'll soon publish the first in a series of short companion posts, Reflections from the Reading Club, starting with the question of whether DMPs actually deliver on their promises.
With the Flemish Open Science Policy Plan 2026–2030 now in place and several new project groups gearing up for kick-off, we expect the club to stay a useful companion to that work. We're looking forward to what comes next for the FRDN, its project groups, and our quietly persistent Reading Club.