Top European Organisations funded to coordinate six RDA National Nodes

RDA Europe, the European plug-in to the Research Data Alliance, ran the second call for RDA Europe national nodes to expand its European network. Six new countries are joining forces to foster adoption of RDA outputs in the region.

Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Norway and Sweden have been selected as new RDA Europe nodes; till the end of the project in May 2020, they will be engaging with research communities, supporting national agendas, and contributing to the EU Open Science Strategy to ensure capillary uptake of RDA principles and outputs. Moreover, they will be working to increase the participation in RDA globally.

What can we expect of the new nodes?

The Croatian RDA node will be created within the organizational unit of the University of Zagreb Computing Center (SRCE) responsible for the coordination and development of the Digital Academic Archives and Repositories (DABAR) community and related national data services and infrastructures. The main priority will be building capacity and skills in higher education and research libraries to engage in RDA activities, manage research data and support researchers on their institutions. The Croatian node is planning to work closely with the community, involving representatives from each university library as “local” RDA contact point and potential members of RDA IGs and WGs.

In Czech Republic, the RDA node (RDA HR) will rely on the expertise and network matured by the Plan4all association and its members in the Czech Republic (currently 19 organisations). The key priority topic of the node will be precision agriculture as this is the key area of Plan4all involvement in RDA. This topic will be extended by other fields based on priorities of the Czech community.

The Hungarian node of RDA (called HRDA) as an entity has been established at the time of the application to the call from RDA Europe. The priority in Hungary is to foster skills and knowledge around Research Data Management (RDM), especially at the institutional and funder’s levels, therefore promoting the creation of specific policies. HRDA also aims at providing a discussion forum on RDM for the interested parties, like the researchers, IT and other professionals, librarians/archivists, to build bridges between these often unconnected communities, and help and consulting for the preparation of research proposals regarding RDM.

In Lithuania, the RDA EU node will be established with the collaboration of several institutions. Its work and effort will focus on Research Data Management: this topic has emerged as a recent issue in the Lithuanian scholarly context because of the global intensification of Open Access activities, regional and national developments in terms of policy making and, above all, as a result of the EC mandate to share the research data of publicly funded research.

The Norwegian RDA EU node will be run by a consortium of seven partners, each of them with specific roles in the activities around the node, and led by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). RDA NO will focus on supporting the implementation of RDA outputs and recommendations and on areas of strategic importance for the Nordic region, such as Data Management Plans, FAIR Data Stewardship and management of sensitive data in research within the framework of current international and statutory regulations.

In Sweden, the RDA EU node will be set up as a sub-unit of the Swedish National Data (SND) Service head office, with a working group including members of the SND Consortium. To align with key national and European projects of relevance, RDA SE will investigate the community to identify the hot topics and needs and map these to RDA groups. RDA SE will liaise with relevant high-level stakeholders and policy makers as well as relevant professional bodies, to discuss high-priority RDM-related topics and how to address these in a national & Nordic perspective.

New opportunity to join the RDA Europe national node network

The third and final call for new RDA Europe nodes is open now until August: if you’re interested, visit https://grants.rd-alliance.org/node/1019 and apply!