RDA 8th Plenary Joint meeting: IG Active Data Management Plans, IG Preservation e-Infrastructure and IG Reproducibility

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31 May 2016 3201 reads

Meeting title: Tools Convergence: Integrating Data Management Plan and Preservation Tools

Please give a brief introduction describing the activities and scope of the group(s)

Preservation e-Infrastructure IG:
The purpose of the PeIIG is to reach wide agreement on the e-Infrastructure services which are needed to help repositories to preserve their data holdings, to ensure the interoperability of service implementations, and to build trust of service providers. Such distributed services supporting interoperability, including those that support continued usability, authenticity, accessibiliy, retrievability, visualization and replication, should allow the repositories to simplify, share the cost of, and improve, their preservation activities.

Reproducibility IG:
The Reproducibility IG seeks to advance and enable reproducibility in research based on or producing datasets. Our goals are to provide community based recommendations and infrastructure solutions, doing so in coordination with the other RDA Working and Interest Groups where appropriate. Our efforts are also intended to produce Working Groups that can pilot these recommendations and solutions, with an eye to building on existing computational infrastructure.

Active Data Management Plans IG:
The proposed activity of the Active Data Management Plans IG is to act as a nucleus for discussing requirements for and identifying developments needed to support active (i.e. able to evolve and be monitored) data management planning. 
Currently research data management plans (DMP), created at the proposal stage of a project, do not evolve and cannot be monitored in any detail. The DMP should begin at the planning stage for any dataset, evolving through its entire lifecycle and is therefore fundamental to ensuring that data is appropriately managed, archived, preserved and available for re-use. 
Potential working groups include specifying practical tools and services to support the data creators and their organisations in managing and making their data re-usable and also as the data managers and funders that have a requirement to administer and monitor these plans. The ADMP IG is distinct from, but will need to work with, many other groups including those on certification, domain repositories, metadata and preservation e-infrastructures.

Please provide additional links to informative material related to the participating groups i.e. group pages, case statements, working documents etc

This is a follow-up session to the “Preservation Tools” discussion, where the interrelations between knowledge preservation tools and active data management plans, and how requirements for greater reproducibility might influence the design and/or infrastructure can be explored. The overall goal is to reach a set of requirements for what knowledge preservation tools might look like to satisfy the need for:
• Increased research productivity
• Increased transparency and verifiability through reproducibility
• Increased integration with archives through active engagement in data management

We expect these this session and the one immediately preceding it to be the beginning of a much broader discussion on these topics within RDA.

Please list the meeting objectives

• To understand the relationships between data management planning tools and knowledge preservation tools
o Current usage
o Future integration
• How can DMPs support, rather than mandate, reproducibility and preservation?
• How do DMP tools support knowledge preservation tools and vice versa?
• Can preservation tools help drive the DMP structure?
• Does the interfacing of preservation tools with archives make for much richer DMPs? 
• Or does this over-complicate DMPs and reduce ease of use?
• To understand how mandated reproducibility (data and software sharing) might impact either or both preservation tools and DMPs
• To understand gaps in this infrastructure
o This will necessarily be discipline-specific 

• To understand how DMPs can address the potential evolution of preferred data descriptions, formats, etc., as the prospective audience changes.

Meeting agenda

1. Discussion of current alignment between DM Planning tools and community preservation needs

a. Short presentations by developers and researchers
b. Includes research software as well as research portal infrastructure
2. Discussion of DMP tool shortcomings
a. Could these be filled by preservation tools?
3. Discussion of the role of reproducibility
a. What tools/features are needed?
b. How can the additional restrictions be accommodated in existing structures?
c. What new developments would be needed?

Audience: Please specify who is your target audience and how they should prepare for the meeting

We invite all of: researchers who wish to preserve the knowledge surrounding their results; those who have experience in doing so; and those who study knowledge preservation schema and infrastructure to contribute to the discussion.
Short contributions with 1-2 slides are welcome; please notify the organizers Mike Hildreth, Victoria Stodden, or Helen Glaves by September 1.