Adoption of RDA solutions across all disciplines & domains
May 2020
“The role of Citation is crucial in open-data-driven science. The RDA has successfully defined new models for citation in the digital era. Several communities already adopted these RDA outputs and shown the implementation way.” Dr. Carlo Maria Zwölf, Nicolas Moreau and Yaye-Awa Ba, PSL Research University, CNRS and the Sorbonne University
Since 2013, 45 flagship recommendations and outputs have been produced by RDA Working and Interest Groups (May 2020). These are very wide ranging, addressing registries for persistent identifiers and data types, policy templates, repository audit methodologies, standards directories, curricula, wheat data interoperability, data/literature cross-linking and many other fields. A number of recommendations have also been endorsed as ICT technical specifications by the European Multi-Stakeholder Platform on ICT specifications. We’ve asked RDA members who have already adopted RDA outputs to share their experience and lessons learned.
The French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA) is Europe’s top agricultural research institute and the world’s number two centre for agricultural sciences. Being part of the RDA Interest Group on Agricultural Data has been particularly fruitful in terms of strategic and technical advances to increase scientific data discoverability and interoperability at a community level on Wheat Data with regard to semantic-based solutions for data handling and analysis. Read the full story
The Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC), a consortium of institutes and research institutions which share a common technical and political framework for the distribution and curation of atomic and molecular data, implemented both the RDA recommendations for Data Citation to identify and cite dynamic data and the Scholix output to link datasets from the VAMDC. Read the story
The Climate Change Centre Austria (CCCA) Data Centre expected a comprehensive project outcome of completely new simulated High Resolution Climate Scenarios for Austria in the time range from 1965 to 2100 on a daily basis. While looking for best practices on persistent identifiers and sub-setting tools for such big data containers, they met members of the RDA Data Citation Working Group. The idea of using the RDA recommendation on dynamic data citation was born. Read more
Another story coming from Austria is piloted by the Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resource Monitoring (EODC) that is part of the consortium implementing the open Earth Observation (openEO) standard, which aims to standardize communication between EO scientists and data and service providers. EODC adopted the RDA Data Citation Recommendations on an openEO. Read the story
Looking at the Social Sciences and Humanities landscape, the RDA Data Fabric outputs fit well with the CLARIN ERIC research infrastructure ecosystem to cross connect datasets from neighbouring communities such as DARIAH and Europeana, making the dataflow work and ensuring interoperability. Read more
RDA/WDS: impact on quality assessment repositories across the globe
Three Working Groups are the result of the collaboration between the Research Data Alliance and the World Data System of the International Science Council (WDS). Their outcomes boast a series of impactful adoption cases.
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) collaborated closely with the RDA Data policy standardisation and implementation IG and adopted An open, universal literature-data cross-linking service - RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services WG Recommendations and the Repository Audit and Certification DSA–WDS Partnership WG Recommendations. OpenAIRE (openaire.eu) acts as a data source for the OpenAIRE ScholeXplorer Service, also developed by the RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services Working Group, exposing its literature – dataset links collected and inferred from institutional repositories. OpenAIRE also implemented the RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services WG Outputs, a framework for sharing information about the links between literature and research data, and the Scholix Interoperability Framework: an interoperability framework for exchanging information about the links between scholarly literature and data. Read more
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Science Forum (GSF) adopted the Income Streams for Data Repositories report produced by the RDA/WDS Publishing Data Cost Recovery for Data Centres Interest Group. This group provided the OECD with a substantial overview on income streams for data repositories. Read more
CoreTrustSeal offers to any interested data repository a core level certification based on the DSA–WDS Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements catalogue and procedures. This universal catalogue of requirements reflects the core characteristics of trustworthy data repositories, and is the culmination of a cooperative effort between the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) and the WDS under the umbrella of the Research Data Alliance to harmonize their data repository certifications. A global set of six adoption stories continues to inspire its further uptake by sharing a wide variety of challenges faced, implementation processes and lessons learned. Read more
The impact on the publisher industry
The industry market is also taking advantage from RDA outputs. Wiley is a publishing company that focuses on academic publishing and instructional materials. RDA helps Wiley make open research publishing easier for researchers, for instance through the work of the Scholarly Link Exchange Working Group, the FAIRsharing Registry Working Group and the Data Policy Standardisation and Implementation Interest Group. Read more
The publisher sector is also a target of the Enabling FAIR data project, spear-headed by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), to make data FAIR across the Earth and space science community. This effort built on the work of The Coalition on Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS.org), Earth Science Information Partners (ESIP), Research Data Alliance (RDA), the scientific journals, and domain repositories to ensure that well documented data, preserved in a repository with community-endorsed metadata and suitable persistent identifiers, becomes part of the expected research products submitted in support of each publication.
RDA Global Adoption week: 15-19 June 2020
The adoption session, originally planned for Plenary 15, is now turning into a global adoption week scheduled from 15 to 19 June 2020. The aim remains to demonstrate the wide variety of adoptable and adopted solutions to data sharing challenges that people in the field encounter in their daily jobs.
The global adoption week will provide the opportunity to learn about RDA Outputs, converse with speakers from all around the world who have created and implemented them, and determine how best to integrate those data sharing solutions into your own projects. The global adoption week will be organised around five Research Data Lifecycles. More information will be provided soon on RDA channels.