Just before All Hallows Eve, Dr Samantha Pearman-Kanza presented a warning spooky tale about the pitfalls of not stewarding your data properly at Lab Innovations 2025.
This 2-day in-person event, hosted at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) in Birmingham, is the UK’s leading showcase for laboratory excellence, technology, and innovation. It brings together industry experts and solution providers to explore every facet of modern lab management—from sustainable facilities and operational efficiency to cutting-edge digital transformation.
Lab Innovations champions the future of laboratories by putting data at the heart of every process. From integrated workflows and AI-driven analytics to compliance-ready systems, the event showcases technologies that transform raw information into actionable insights. It’s not just about instruments—it’s about building interoperable, future-ready ecosystems where data flows seamlessly, powering smarter science and faster breakthroughs. As such its vital that we promote data stewardship across a range of disciplines and across industry and academia, as CaSDaRs grand vision involves data stewards embedded in ALL institutions.
In her presentation, Samantha presented a tale of caution entitled “Introducing The FAIR Phantom: Why Data Without Stewardship Haunts Reproducibility” reflecting on the “end based nature” of the FAIR Principles, explaining why FAIR alone can’t banish the ghosts of poor data practices, and how many of the issues with FAIR data occur at the creation/collection stage, making it absolutely imperative that we have data stewards involved at every stage of the research data lifecycle to mitigate against these potential mistakes. The presentation also introduced CaSDaR, detailing our roadmap, deliverables, projects partners and team, and our overarching plans for the next four years, including our upcoming funding call.
Samantha’s slides can be found here: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17522988