The Research Data Alliance’s vision is Researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society
The Research Data Alliance’s vision is Researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of societyThe Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a community-driven organization whose mission is to develop the social and technical data infrastructure needed to drive innovation surrounding data sharing and data interoperability. Established in 2013, RDA supports more than 11,800 international individual members representing 145 countries, over 60 organisational members from across the globe. This global, dynamic and community-driven initiative has generated over 50 concrete outputs (eight of which are recognized as European ICT technical specifications) with over 140 documented adoption cases (May 2021). |
What is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)?
The objective of the EOSC is to give the European Union a global lead in research data management and ensure that European scientists reap the full benefits of data-driven science, by offering ‘1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science and technology a virtual environment with free at the point of use, open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines’ [2]
Open Science is seen as a crucial component in advancing science and benefiting society [3], and sharing of Research Data is central to these aims. RDA addresses this need for open and interoperable sharing of research data and builds the social, technical and cross-disciplinary links to enable such sharing on a global scale. Furthermore, the implementation of the EOSC as a “federated model that combines effectiveness and flexibility, primarily through the Research Infrastructures (including eInfrastructures)” [4] will require seamless access to data and integration of services which implies standards. RDA provides a neutral, global forum to further research innovation, efficiency and reproducibility. It facilitates socio-technical discussion and exchange by identifying best practices and standards for research data, tools and infrastructure.
Currently there are two specific grants that the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is specifically supporting:
RDA4EOSC - RDA supporting the internationalisation and implementation of EOSC
Detailed overview of activities
Pillar 1: Identify and prepare new scientific and research communities to engage with EOSC
View the assessment report and recommendations at |
Pillar 2: Adoption and implementation of technological and/or domain specific research data solutions in EOSC
Pillar 3: Connecting EOSC with international stakeholders via RDA governance
A Commons Compendium
Supporting coordination amongst national, pan-national and domain specific reasearch commons.
View the Commons Compendium at
https://www.rd-alliance.org/commons-compendium
Pillar 4: Gaining international consensus and input on EOSC
RDA Community Memos |
RDA4EOSC Community Memo - Identification and engagement with research communities |
Pillar 5: Institutional, policy maker and global stakeholder engagement
RDA in the EOSC Future project
The RDA European office - RDA Association AISBL - is focused the following specific areas of support to EOSC:
Widening EOSC Awareness and Engagement in underrepresented communities
Objective: support the creation of readiness and awareness of science and research communities that are not included in ESFRI. Classification of three levels of interaction with EOSC
How / Whom: leveraging on research infrastructure and e-infrastructure experience and best practices matured in WP6, INFRAEOSC-07 projects and beyond
Synchronising EOSC with Global Open Science Initiatives
Objective: Coordinating international data commons initiatives, identifying technological solutions not currently available and encouraging the creation of new EOSC-focused RDA working groups to develop and drive them.
How / Whom:
- RDA Global Open Research Commons (GORC) Interest Group
- RDA Global Open Research Commons International Benchmarking Working group
- RDA Funders Forum
- RDA Research Funders and Stakeholders on Open Research and Data Management Policies and Practices Interest Group
- Data Together (CODATA, GO FAIR, RDA, WDS) collaboration
- RDA & EOSC Future partners’ global networks & connections
RDA Open call / Cascading Grant Strategic content definition and coordination
EOSC Future grants platform is already live & RDA Open Calls to support EOSC will open in July. In the meantime we are seeking experts to assist evaluate the very many applications we expect to receive to leverage on the €1 million fund.
The Research Data Alliance contributing to the European Open Science Cloud. The report by RDA Europe 4.0 (March 2020)
The RDA platform is being significantly leveraged in the creation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The Report on RDA integration with other European initiatives issued by RDA Europe 4.0 project describes the key finding from a survey conducted amongst 22 current, EOSC-related projects. The report is the work of experts from University of Göttingen (Ugoe), the Royal Irish Academy (Ria), Trust-it Services and The University Of Edinburgh (Uedin), all members of the RDA Europe 4 consortium. Click here to access the full report [13]
[1] RDA Outputs are the technical and social infrastructure solutions developed by RDA Working Groups or Interest Groups that enable data sharing, exchange, and interoperability.
These Outputs have an important impact in two areas: solving problems, and incorporation and/or adoption in infrastructure environments by individuals, projects and organisations.
RDA Outputs have the following classifications: 1. RDA Recommendations; 2. Supporting Outputs; 3. Other Outputs
[2] Implementation Roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud, SWD (2018) 83, March 2018
[3] Towards a common European data space, SWD(2018) 125, April 2018
[4] SWD(2018) 83.