RDA-CODATA Interest Group on Legal Interoperability of Research Data
Notes from 30 January 2015 Conference Call
Participants: Simon Hodson, Enrique Alonso Garcia, Robert Chen, Paul Uhlir, Christoph Bruch, Herbert Gruttemeier, Donat Agosti, Willi Egloff, Maria llosent, Gail Clement, Bernard Minster
We recapped the results of the conference call two weeks earlier. The main decision then was to narrow the focus from open access and reuse to the “legal interoperability of research data”. This was initiated by a couple of emails from Christoph Bruch and generally supported by the IG. The main rationale was that there already were a lot of statements/declarations/principles focused on openness over the past 15 years, but none on “legal interoperability.” Moreover, it is the stated focus of this IG.
The question of how to do this was topic of most of the ensuing conversation. What would be the most useful product? There was general agreement to keep and revise the high-level Principles, develop some subsidiary Guidelines, and use the existing case studies to illustrate real-world context and application of the Principles/Guidelines. The latter would be more effective than just pure abstractions and theory.
Issues that were identified that need to be integrated into the high-level documents included:
Harmonization: remains a key concept.
A focus on rights holders: determine who has rights, what rights are they, how should they be shared?
Authentication: of rights and rights holders (license/agreement)
Discoverability: metadata need to be sufficiently descriptive, clear, standardized
Preservation: metadata also key
Replicability: management of data (?)
Compatibility: technical, semantic, and legal interoperability
Methodology: use online tags—PIDs, CC license, Orchid
Action items for next conference call (Feb 6): everyone provide comments by Wednesday evening, the 4th on the google.docs wiki at (cut and paste the URL):