RDA Groups

FAIR research software skills and training curriculums need to be identified and incorporated into broader efforts to facilitate increased support and recognition for the qualified personnel needed to achieve open science.

Extensive work has been, and continues to be done on data interoperability at the technical and information domains. However, a large portion of the challenges in building interoperable information infrastructures are the result of the interplay between organisations, institutions, economics, and individuals.

Software source code plays a critical role in all fields of modern research, where source code is written and developed to address a variety of needs, like cleaning, processing and visualising data.

Software source code is a necessary component for research reproducibility and reusability. 

The vision of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is that “researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.” The Mission of RDA is that it “builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data.”

Increasingly researchers who are not co-located are seeking to work dynamically together at various scales from the local to global using the internet to share data, models, workflows, best practice, publications, management and administration of their research etc. The Virtual Research Environments Interest Group (VRE-IG) seeks to build the required technical bridges, skills and social communities that enable global sharing and processing of data across technologies, disciplines and countries through the creation of shared online virtual environments. As these individual VREs grow, inevitably they need to also connect with major national research infrastructures.

The goal of the VRE-IG is to identify the technical issues to and - where known - share solutions that enable online access to data required to address issues that can range from local challenges (which are also potentially of direct relevance to researchers in other geographical areas or other research domains), to the research grand challenges currently being faced by society on global issues, e.g., societal impacts of climate change; sustainable cities; and environmentally sensitive utilisation of the scarce resources of our planet.

Lack of interoperability between tools/e-infrastructures presents a significant barrier to streamlining processes throughout the research lifecycle. These gaps prevent the comprehensive collection and incorporation of research data and metadata into the research record captured during the active research phase. Furthermore, it limits the scope for passing this data and metadata on to data repositories, thus undermining FAIR data principles and reproducibility.