Rick’s MetaTips: Reflections from Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting in Tokyo | SHARE

"This month’s MetaTips is a reflection back on my week at the seventh Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting (RDA P7) in Tokyo, Japan, three weeks ago. RDA is an international community with a mission to build the social and technical infrastructure to support open data sharing across disciplines. RDA is particularly significant because it has balanced participation and leadership internationally from government organizations, funders, publishers, libraries, computational scientists, and researchers—in essence, the core stakeholders for SHARE. In turn, RDA is the perfect environment in which to develop strategies that are jointly conceived, championed, and implemented by members of a diverse community. The focal points and vehicles for all activity are working groups, each of which has a specific charge and set of deliverables that must be achieved within 18 months. The end result is that the community has already delivered steady progress on research-data goals, instead of being stalled by being too ambitious. Another aspect that makes RDA different from other communities is that the Plenary Meeting is not really a conference, but rather a meeting for everyone involved in working groups to assemble and coordinate working group activity for the next six months. This brings us to the seventh Plenary Meeting (RDA P7 programme) in Tokyo this month. In addition to the community representatives already mentioned, many large aggregators of repository and/or research events were also present, such as OpenAIRE (Europe), RD-Switchboard (represented by Australian National Data Service), PANGAEA, and SHARE. There were more than 50 sessions of working groups (WGs), interest groups (IGs), and birds of a feather (BoFs). Before an IG or WG is created, interested parties can convene a BoF session one time during an RDA Plenary Meeting to gauge interest and organize ideas around a particular topic. Particularly notable at RDA P7 was community alignment around data sharing and connectivity between hubs and repositories in the BoF on Data Search, BoF Preparation of the Research Data Repository Interoperability WG, and the WG RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services sessions ..."