Adoption Stories
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) currently hosts over 60 Interest Groups and more than 30 Working Groups consisting of experts who are working on various topics related to (open) research data and innovation. These working groups produce the RDA outputs: the technical and social infrastructure solutions enabling data sharing, exchange, and interoperability.
For you, to see how to implement the RDA outputs to improve the sharing, exchange and interoperability of your own data, we’ve asked RDA members who have already adopted RDA outputs, to share their experience and lessons learned in a story. Find below a series of RDA adoption stories by individuals, organisations and projects.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) adopted the 39 Hints to Facilitate the Use of Semantics for Data on Agriculture and Nutrition. To promote the use of semantics for agricultural data for the purpose of enhancing data interoperability in agriculture. During the RDA Global adotion week RDA Europe 4.0 ambassador for agricultural sciences Caterina Carracciolo presented the FAO adoption story.
Following a successful application to the RDA Europe 4.0 open call for Adoption Grants, the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics (FMI) at Sofia University St. Kliment Ohridski started working on unifying the knowledge concerned with the study of wheat and the factors affecting the health and viability of the cereal.
The University of Tartu (UT) is a classical university, located in the South-Eastern part of Estonia, founded in 1632. The University of Tartu belongs to the top 1.2% of the world’s best universities. At the moment, there are more than 13 thousand students (12% international students, 39% master’s and doctoral students) and 3000 employees (51% academic staff of which 186 are professors and 14% are international teaching and research staff members).
Argos is an online machine-actionable tool developed by OpenAIRE to facilitate Research Data Management (RDM) activities concerning the implementation of Data Management Plans (DMPs). Argos enhances OpenAIRE’s continuous efforts towards Open Science Commons and a Linked Open Data environment that brings data closer to where they are stored and managed, aiming at better reproducibility and integrity of research.
The lessons we have picked-up from the adoption process is that there is real value in adopting as early as possible the application profile. This helps to identify missing features and to give feedback on the use-case which may or may not be inline with the original intentions.
With the support of an RDA Europe 4.0 grant, the project team, led by Chris Schubert, has implemented the Scalable Dynamic-data Citation Methodology in order to extend the CCCA’s services to a further research domain, namely the Earth Observation Sciences.
SEAGrid is a science gateway that provides access to computational and data management resources using desktop and web browser based applications to the academic science and engineering communities.
A joint bid by the University of Debrecen and the Library and Information Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (LIC-HAS) was awarded an RDA Europe 4.0 Adoption grant, with the aim of employing RDA Recommendations in the evaluation of the already existing data repositories in Hungary and establishing a standardised approach to managing research data workflows
University of Pretoria (UP)’s Department of Information Science in collaboration with the Data Intensive Research Initiative of South Africa (DIRISA), South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR) and the Network of Data and Information Curation Communities (NeDICC) and Data Carpentry SA initiated the first school in South Africa with the help of three co-chairs respectively from the Institute of Science Innovation and Society, University of Oxford, the Royal Holloway, University of London and Tofail University, Morocco. As of 2021 the University of Cape Town is also represented on our Steering Committee.
Guidelines based on four RDA outputs and recommendations to improve data citation, sharing and reuse in connection to scientific journal publications.
DiSSCo adopts the RDA Recommendations on Virtual Layers, Basic Vocabularies and Metadata Standards for Attribution of Physical and Digital Collections Stewardship.
Crossref adopts the Scholix Metadata Schema for Exchange of Scholarly Communication Links
The Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias (IAC) has designed a “reproducible paper” template by following best practices, including RDA recommendations and outputs, in their research since 2015. It has significantly grown since then, and is now a fully documented template. With the support of an RDA Europe 4.0 grant, the project team, led by Dr Mohammad Akhlaghi, is aiming to improve, test, and promote our adoption of RDA guidelines, and in particular the “Workflows for Research Data Publishing” recommendation and output.
The Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud adopts the RDA Metadata Standards Directory Working Group recommendation.
Springer Nature adopted FAIRsharing Registry and Recommendations: Interlinking Standards, Databases and Data Policies.
Following a successful application to the RDA Europe 4.0 open call for Adoption Grants, the Dutch National Coordination Point Research Data Management (LCRDM) started it work to tailor the 23 Things to the Dutch research community, as well as producing audience-specific versions of the 23 Things.
FAIRsFAIR Adopts the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model Specification and Guidelines.
Following a successful application to the RDA Europe 4.0 open call for Adoption Grants, the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC) began its project to quality check and document the data stored in the Climate Data Store (CDS). The Climate Data Store repository contains various types of data for which summaries are presented at the level of variable and dataset. Adopting and presenting the RDA metadata repository as a trustful reference, and using the various standards gathered there, has helped to improve recommendations on what should be presented in the CDS.
During the IDCC 2020 meeting in Dublin in February 2020, the RDA interviewed Tom Renner – Lead developer repository offering at Haplo. In the interview Renner told the Haplo adoption story of the RDA DMP Common Standard for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans where he explains the adoption process, the benefits and the lessons learned.
During the RDA 14th Plenary meeting in Helsinki in October 2019, the RDA interviewed Shelley Stall from the American Geophysical Union(AGU). In the interview Stall told the enabling FAIR Data in the the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences where she explained the adoption processes and the lessons learned.
During the IDCC 2020 meeting in Dublin in February 2020, the RDA interviewed Chris Gibson, Research Services Librarian (Data) at the University of Manchester Library. In the interview Gibson told the University of Manchester Library adoption story of the Scholix Metadata Schema for Exchange of Scholarly Communication Links where he explains the adoption process, the benefits and the lessons learned.
Norwegian Centre for Research Data adopts RDA DMP Common Standard for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans Recommendation.
Adopting the RDA Data Citation Recommendations on an openEO. The Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resource Monitoring (EODC) located in Austria works with high-performance computing services and large amounts of data on a daily basis. Since 2017, it has been part of the consortium implementing the open Earth Observation (openEO) standard, which aims to standardize communication between EO scientists and data and service providers. It allows scientists to write code one time only and use it on different backend providers, but has the downfall of being not transparent. Adding data citation to the standardized process enables insights into what specific data was used in EO workflows.
OpenAIRE adopts an open, universal literature-data cross-linking service, RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services Working Group Recommendation.
During the RDA 14th Plenary meeting in Helsinki in October 2019, the RDA interviewed Dieter Van Uytvanck, Technical Director at CLARIN ERIC. In the interview Van Uytvanck told the CLARIN adoption story of the RDA outputs by the Data Fabric IG where he explains the adoption process, the RDA network effect and the lessons learned.
During the RDA 14th Plenary meeting in Helsinki in October 2019, the RDA interviewed Chris Graf, Director Research Integrity and Publishing Ethics at Wiley. In the interview Graf told the story of how RDA’s work on data sharing policies helps Wiley extend the requirement for data availability statements to journals.
CoreTrustSeal offers to any interested data repository a core level certification based on the DSA–WDS Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements catalogue and procedures. The RDA Secretariat has collected a global set of 5 adoption stories to inspire its further uptake by sharing a wide variety of challenges faced, implementation processes and lessons learned.
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 till 2100 on a daily basis. For consumption, 13 model runs, 5 meteorological parameters like temperature, 3 emission scenarios, over 1600 NetCDF files with an average size of 13 GB were calculated. How could we implement proper data management processes on such data packages? The idea of using the RDA Recommendation on Data Citation of Evolving Data as a pilot “NetCDF Pilot Implementation of Climate Scenarios” came out.
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.
As a participant to groups and meetings from almost the beginning of RDA, INRA became a natural adopter of recommendations from agricultural related working groups and several others. In fact, RDA has contributed to many aspects of INRA’s Open Science policy either directly or indirectly.
The Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC) implemented on the one hand, the RDA recommendations for Data Citation to identify and cite dynamic data. On the other hand the Scholix output to link datasets from from the VAMDC.
OpenAIRE implemented the RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services WG Outputs to link datasets from institutional repositories.
DKRZ (German Climate Computing Center) is integrating persistent identifiers for use cases supporting precise data tracking, automated replication and versioning, custom and early data citation into the Earth System Grid Federation data infrastructure which supports WCRP CMIP6 data provisioning.