I hope everyone is having a great summer, wherever in the world you are – wether it be hot or cold, wet or dry! Although we have not sent out many updates recently, the chairs have been doing a lot of things over that time period and we wanted to update you on those activities and some that are upcoming. We plan to send out more frequent updates in the coming months. Please be in touch with any interesting activities you are aware of, and watch the Recent Activity on the group space at: https://rd-alliance.org/groups/chemistry-research-data-interest-group.html.
Past events
Symposium “Global Initiatives in Research Data Management & Discovery”, ACS Meeting in San Diego, CA (March 13-14, 2016)
– A three session (1 1/2 day) symposium led by Ian and Leah highlighted relevant activities worldwide concerning data exchange and chemistry data. A brief report is available at: http://bulletin.acscinf.org/node/873, with abstracts and slides at: http://acscinf.org/content/cinf-2016-data-summit-slides-251st-acs-meetin….
RDA/US Leadership Meeting in Troy, NY (May 16-17, 2016)
– Leah and Stuart attended a meeting of the US-based RDA/US staff, WG chairs, IG chairs, and grantees to discuss the current state of RDA/US governance, funding issues, etc.
RDA WG/IG Chairs Meeting in Nottingham UK (June 8-9, 2016)
– Stuart and Richard attended a joint meeting of WG and IG chairs. Many working groups reported their progress and ideas on how RDA might work more efficiently wrt to working groups, including much discussion focused on outreach and education. Other topics: How do we get researchers to RDA meetings?; What better ways can we communicate to the community?; How do we train folk in different disciplines that can then go out and inform researchers about RDA and activities.
RDA/US and IUPAC sponsored workshop on “Prioritizing Digital Data Challenges in Chemistry: Road-mapping Technical Opportunities and Business Cases with the RDA, IUPAC, and the Chemistry Community’, Raleigh-Durham, NC (July 14-15, 2016)
– Partially funded by an RDA/US outreach grant, this two day workshop focused on developing project proposals related to chemistry data exchange suitable for both RDA and IUPAC project workflows. The two themes were ‘Chemical Structure Standardization’ and ‘Chemical Terminology’ (i.e. terms in the IUPAC color books), both central to communicating chemical information among humans and machines and across disciplines. A detailed report is in the works and project documents in development can be viewed at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8GUqPrCq3etRzdOU1BqRFZESFU. Please contribute comments and contact one of us if you are interested in any of these projects.
Upcoming events
Symposium “Chemistry Data for the People: From Policy to Practice”, ACS Meeting in Philadelphia (Aug 21-25)
– Monday Aug 22 session: “Chemistry data pain points: Distilled, analyzed, and next steps”
Follow up presentations and community discussion on the RDA/IUPAC workshop and ACS San Diego Data Summit. What are the persistent “pain points” in exchanging and communicating chemical data? How are community activities clustering around these concerns? Where are opportunities for building and formalizing community practices? What tools and services can extend adoption of data standards?
International Data Week (September 11-17, 2016)
– Three separate events back to back to back
– SciDataCon 2016: International conference for scrutiny and discussion of the frontier issues of data in research
– International Data Forum: Forum bringing together international researchers, industrialists, policy makers and educators to discuss the major
opportunities and challenges of the data revolution, from ‘Big Data’ to ‘Open Data.’
– RDA 8th Plenary: Working Group, Interest Group, and Birds of a Feather meetings detailing the activities of RDA worldwide.
More info and program at https://rd-alliance.org/plenaries/rda-eighth-plenary-meeting-denver-co
– Register soon as the early bird discount for registration for IDW is available until August 8. More info at http://www.internationaldataweek.org/
Other topics
– We would like to give a shout-out to the new RDA/US Secretariat Community Development Director, Lynn Yarmey. Although she has only been with RDA since May she help us significantly with the workshop above. More info about Lynn can be found at http://us.rd-alliance.org/news/rdaus-announces-lynn-yarmey-new-director-…
– While there is much momentum in chemistry data and information among the group, we need and welcome community perspective on areas of focus for the Interest Group on things you think are important. Contact any one of the chairs with your thoughts, questions, comments and you are welcome to start discussions using the groups email (***@***.***-groups.org).
All for now.
Ian, Stuart, Richard, Dave, Leah