Reflections on the Work of the Research Data Alliance – NLM Musings from the Mezzanine

"The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a community-driven, interdisciplinary, international organization dedicated to collaboratively building the social and technical infrastructure necessary for wide-scale data sharing and advancing open science initiatives. Just short of five years old, this group gathers twice a year at plenary meetings, the most recent just last week. These are no big-lecture, hallway-conversation meetings. As I discovered in Berlin last week, they are working meetings, in the best sense of the phrase—where the work involves creating and validating the mechanisms and standards for data sharing. That work is done by volunteers from across disciplines—over 7,000 people engaged in small work groups, local activities, and conference-based sessions. These volunteers deliberate and construct standards for data sharing, and then establish strategies for testing and endorsing these standards and gaining community consensus and adoption—including partnering with notable standard-setting bodies such as ISO or IEEE. Much of the work focuses on making data and data repositories FAIR— Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable—which is something I’ve talked a lot about in this blog...."