RDA 8th Plenary Joint meeting: IG Preservation e-Infrastructure, IG Reproducibility

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31 May 2016 2451 reads

Meeting title: Knowledge Preservation Tools for Researchers: You have to preserve your data before you can share it!

Groups: IG Preservation e-Infrastructure, IG Reproducibility

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

The charges, as stated:

Preservation e-Infrastructure:
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:
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.

As such, the topic of the proposed session sits squarely between the two groups.

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

This meeting is intended to fill a gap in the RDA discussion thus far, which is how to make it easy for researchers to preserve their research results in a way that is beneficial to sharing with others and for further research. These issues are encountered immediately in any discussion with researchers about data sharing or open data. The main elements of the necessary infrastructure have been set out in many documents, including the report of a recent NSF-sponsored workshop on open data in the mathematical and physical sciences: https://mpsopendata.crc.nd.edu/. Clearly, this is a step towards reproducible research, which is why this is proposed as a joint session.

We expect this session and the joint session with Reproducibility and Active Data Management plans that follows, to be the beginning of a much broader discussion on these topics within RDA.

Please list the meeting objectives

The objectives of the meeting are:
• To survey the preservation tools currently in use by researchers:
- Types of data, software, workflows, etc. that are being or should be preserved
- Cyberinfrastructure required
• To establish a taxonomy of the preservation tools currently in use by researchers
- This will necessarily be discipline-specific 

• To identify shortcomings in functionality or gaps in the existing toolkits that make knowledge preservation hard to impossible
- What do gaps tell us about failings in dissemination, if anything?
• To understand how these tools relate to data management planning throughout the data lifecycle 

Meeting agenda

1. Discussion of existing Knowledge Preservation tools

a. Short presentations by developers and researchers
b. Includes software as well as research portal infrastructure
2. Discussion of tool shortcomings
3. Creation of Preservation “Wish List” 
a. What tools/features are needed?

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

We invite 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 or Victoria Stodden until September 1.