Community participation and the RDA COVID-19 Recommendations and Guidelines

This session will discuss aspects related to community participation and the effort that led to the development and publication of the RDA COVID-19 Recommendations and Guidelines for data sharing. 

The session will leverage the work done on two follow-up activities, one aimed at providing a summary paper of the final report and the second providing a more in-depth analysis of the community of researchers work behind the Recommendations and Guidelines and the lessons learned. 

The RDA COVID-19 Recommendations outline a set of best practices for data sharing in public health emergencies that supports scientific research and policymaking, including an overarching framework, common tools and processes, and principles that can be embedded in research practice. In developing these Recommendations, it became clear that the speed required and the nature of rapid, effective collaboration between experts from multiple geographies and disciplines made this an exceptional exercise that benefited from leveraging the RDA structures and procedures, but required a considerably shorter timeframe for development. 

Given the effective and rapid development of the Recommendations, we wanted to understand what were the key characteristics of this effort. This would allow us to understand and appreciate,  not only how the RDA Recommendations benefited from this community collaborative process, but also to inform future international collaborative efforts driven by a requirement to bring together expertise from multiple disciplines across the globe, across domains, with a short time frame to address global crisis and  global challenges in general.

A session at the RDA 17th Plenary especially considering  the Plenary theme “Opening Data for Global Challenges”, provides an appropriate opportunity to bring what we learned from and about our collective engagement back to the wider RDA community.