Recommendations & Outputs

RDA Outputs are the technical and social infrastructure solutions developed by RDA Working Groups or Interest Groups that enable data sharing, exchange, and interoperability.

Learn More

About Recommendations & Outputs Recommendation & Output Submission Guidelines

These Outputs have an important impact in two areas: solving problems, and incorporation and/or adoption in infrastructure environments by individuals, projects and organisations. As an organisation, RDA’s goal is to expand awareness and adoption of these Outputs, and hence their impact, within all regions of the world. RDA Outputs are products of the respective Working or Interest Group and should be demonstrably developed and endorsed by the group. Each Output should have the respective Working or Interest Group listed as an author where appropriate.

RDA Outputs are classified as RDA Recommendations (official, endorsed results of RDA Groups), Supporting Outputs (useful solutions from our RDA Working and Interest Groups), Regional Outputs (useful solutions from RDA Partner Regions that have been generated by national level activities) or other Outputs – more information can be found at https://www.rd-alliance.org/what-are-recommendations-and-outputs. They are all listed below and can be searched according to their focus, scientific domain, or by status using the filters on the right. Filters can be combined, too (if more than one filter is selected, results sum up).

Displaying:

results

Order by

Working Group Recommendation

Broadening the Umbrella of Trust: Modular and Inheritable Certification for Repositories, Services, and Software Packages Final outputs of the Research Data Alliance Technical Repository Service Providers Working Group

Review Status: In Community Review

Authors: Lauren Maxwell, Allyson Lister, Dieuwertje Bloemen, Olivier Rouchon, Wim HUGO

Community-developed criteria for trustworthy data repositories concentrate investment on repositories that meet core service criteria. Existing certification frameworks, including CoreTrustSeal, nestor and ISO 16363, judge repositories as a whole and return a binary result. That model covers only a subset of repositories, excludes the technical service providers and software packages on which repositories increasingly depend,…

October 6, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

What Do We Mean by ‘Version’? Actionable Guidelines for the Versioning of Data

Authors: Jens Klump, Lesley Wyborn, Mingfang Wu, Dorothea Strecker

The data lifecycle, from acquisition to release, is increasingly complex, involving multiple processing stages, research groups, and funding sources. There are also growing concerns about data sovereignty and data governance. This complexity demands a robust conceptual framework to ensure reproducible versioning and linking of any original datasets to their many derivatives. To address this, we…

September 23, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

What Do We Mean by ‘Version’? Actionable Guidelines for the Versioning of Data

Authors: Jens Klump, Lesley Wyborn, Mingfang Wu, Dorothea Strecker

September 23, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

What Do We Mean by ‘Version’? Actionable Guidelines for the Versioning of Data

Authors: Jens Klump, Lesley Wyborn, Mingfang Wu, Dorothea Strecker

September 23, 2026

Working Group Recommendation

Harmonised Terminologies and Schemas for FAIR Data in Materials Science and Related Domains Working Group: Final Report and Recommendations

Review Status: Preparing for Council Review

Authors: Marek Cebecauer, Marta Dembska, Gerhard Goldbeck, Jane Greenberg, Gerrit Guenther, Masashi Ishii, Kwang-Ryeol Lee, Iseult Lynch, Wanda Marsolek, Scott McClellan, Leah McEwen, Ryan O’Connor, Athina Papadopoulou, Zachary Trautt

Modern science and technology require the rapid sharing of knowledge. Ongoing digitalisation further increases the dependence of materials design and development on data originating from diverse disciplines, including physics, chemistry, engineering, and medicine. The FAIR principles facilitate data exchange and support the machine-actionable analysis of research outputs. However, materials science and related disciplines lag behind…

July 24, 2026

Working Group Recommendation

Data Director Agentic AI Tool Blueprint

Review Status: Endorsed

Authors: Maricela Abarca, Lindsey Anderson, Julieta Arancio, Rossella Aversa, Amira Azizan, Laure Berti-Equille, Patricia Buendia, James Cannon, Connie Clare, Francis P. Crawley, Mohamed Drira, George Earl, Joseph Edgerton, Lars Eklund, Eva Eleonora Ferradosa, Roberta Ferretti, Angela Fuentes Pardo, Marcelo Garcia, Mohit Garg, Su Nee Goh, Cristina Gonzalez Espinoza, Ritu Gupta, Joe Heffer, Simon Hodson, Jennifer Huck, Maximilian Inckmann, Agate Jarmakovica, Seonyoung Kim, Jens Klump, Piotr Krajewski, Allyson Lister, Marina McGale, Ethel Mendocilla Sato, Natalie Meyers, Natalia Mikolajczak, Naeem Muhammad, Hari Prasad Nepal, Anh Nguyet Vu, Amy Nurnberger, Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström, Ryan O’Connor, Ugochi Okengwu, Allison Olsen, Monica Palmero Fernandez, RAJEEV Pillai, Nadège Poncet, Ronit Purian, Tovo Rabemanantsoa, Trish Radotic, Leonore Reiser, Davide Rizzo, Abiel Roche-Lima, Chokri Ben Romdhane, Marco Rorro, Anna Sackmann, Habiba Sarhan, Bernd Saurugger, Hugh Shanahan, Frankie Stevens, Joanne Stocks, Veronika Stoka, Janine Strandberg, Jenifer Tabita Ciuciu-Kiss, Annerose Tartler-Ostrizek, Andrew Treloar, Slava Tykhonov, Raymond Uzwyshyn, Filippo Vasone, Alex Wade, Ben Wright-Jones, Benjamin Wu, Qi Zhang, Olga Zubova, Carlo Maria Zwölf, Amir Aryani

The Data Director Agentic AI Tool Blueprint v1.0 is a community-developed, technology-agnostic specification for an agentic AI tool to support researchers in preparing and depositing research data for publication in alignment with the FAIR principles. Produced by the Data Director Agentic AI Working Group, an RDA-Microsoft collaboration, it defines 12 functional requirements, 17 non-functional requirements,…

June 29, 2026

Regional Group Output

Disciplinary Data Management Plans That Can Be Used as Examples

Review Status: Endorsed

Authors: Francoise Genova, Francoise Cosserat, BAGE Anne-Sophie, Nadia Guiffant, Paulette Lieby, Lauriane Locatelli, Elodie Papin, Anne Busin, Baptiste Cecconi, Aurélie CLEDAT, Martine Courbin-Coulaud, Cécile Duteille, Amandine Hénon, Nathalie Le Tellier-Becquart, Pellerin Karine, Laurent Rassinoux, Fanny Sébire, Max Beligné, Mathilde Bernier, Florian Boulland, Myriam Chergui, Li Ling, Jérôme Marini, Olivier Marlet, Majid Ounsy, Joel Sudre

RDA France, the French chapter of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), established the RDA France – Disciplinary Data Management Plans (DMPs) Working Group in March 2023. The objective was to create a corpus of disciplinary DMPs that can be used as examples. This Regional Output is Version 1 of the list of disciplinary DMPs resulting…

May 25, 2026

Working Group Recommendation

RDA BIDT WG recommendation documents

Review Status: Endorsed

The RDA Working Group Building Immune Digital Twins (BIDT) developed a set of open, FAIR-aligned resources and community recommendations to accelerate the creation, reuse, and adoption of Immune Digital Twins (IDTs) and broader Medical Digital Twins (MDTs). Over its lifecycle, the WG combined multidisciplinary expertise (immunology, systems biology, clinical research, standards/ontology, software, ethics and policy)…

March 24, 2026

Working Group Recommendation

Managing your drone data through the data life cycle: RDA guidelines for FAIR and responsible RPAS data use

Review Status: Endorsed

Authors: Alice Fremand, Jens Klump, Sarah Manthorpe, Mari Whitelaw, France Gerard, Wendy Garland, THABO SEMONG, Charles George, Hugo Ricketts, nina grau

The use of Remotely Piloted Aerial Systems (RPAS), also referenced as Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and more generally as drones, is increasingly prevalent across various scientific disciplines, enabling the collection of large volumes of data for diverse research applications. However, the volume of data generated and the absence of standardised workflows often complicate data sharing…

March 13, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

Bridging the Data Discovery Gap: User-Centric Recommendations for Research Data Repositories

Authors: Mingfang Wu, Felicitas Löffler, Brigitte Mathiak, Fotis Psomopoulos, Uwe Schindler, Amir Aryani, Jordi BODERA SEMPERE, Antica Culina, Andreas Czerniak, Christopher Erdmann, Kathleen Gregory, Nick Juty, Allyson Lister, Ying-Hsang Liu, Samantha Pearman-Kanza

Despite substantial investment in research data infrastructure, data discovery remains a fundamental challenge in the era of open science. The proliferation of repositories and the rapid growth of deposited data have not resulted in a corresponding improvement in data findability. Researchers continue to struggle to find data that are relevant to their work, revealing a…

March 10, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

An analysis of crosswalks from research data schemas to Schema.org

Authors: Mingfang Wu, Stephen Richard, Chantelle Verhey, Leyla Jael Castro, Baptiste Cecconi, Nick Juty

The increased number of data repositories has greatly increased the availability of open data. To enable broad discovery and access to research dataset, some data repositories have begun leveraging the web architecture by embedding structured metadata markup in dataset web landing pages using vocabularies from Schema.org and extensions. This paper aims to examine metadata interoperability…

March 10, 2026

Interest Group Other Output

Data Discovery Paradigms: User Requirements and Recommendations for Data Repositories

Authors: Mingfang Wu, Fotis Psomopoulos, Siri Jodha Khalsa, Anita de Waard

As data repositories make more data openly available it becomes challenging for researchers to find what they need either from a repository or through web search engines. This study attempts to investigate data users’ requirements and the role that data repositories can play in supporting data discoverability by meeting those requirements. We collected 79 data…

March 10, 2026

Recommendations & Outputs

Learn More

List of Outputs