Making Connections with the Research Data Alliance
Bill Ayres - Research Data Management (RDM) Strategic Lead, University of Manchester.
The Research Data Alliance (or “RDA”) was launched in 2013 and is a truly global organisation, its 12,000+ members spanning 145 countries. Their ethos is “a grass-roots, inclusive approach covering all data lifecycle stages, engaging data producers, users and stewards, addressing data exchange, processing, and storage” [1]. The RDA’s vision focuses on the open sharing and re-use of data across technologies, disciplines and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
For those of us who work with research data in HE institutions, the RDA’s principles of Openness, Inclusivity and being Community-driven provide many opportunities to connect and work with peers to address topics and problems via Communities of Practice, Working and Interest Groups. Their web pages provide a useful introduction to how the RDA works in practice.
Data Stewardship
In mid-2020, I was conducting initial investigations into the roles and practice of Data Stewardship as part of project work for the University’s Research Lifecycle Programme and coincidentally came across a call from the RDA for members for their new Interest Group (IG) on “Professionalising Data Stewardship”.
RDA IGs are often set up as a series of Task Groups (TGs), of which TG3 “Integration of data stewardship across an organisation” seemed the one most relevant to my project, and to which I could bring the most useful perspectives, initially as a member and now as Co-Lead. Our task group has a core membership of around eight active contributors, with business conducted via Slack and fortnightly online meetings. RDA groups recognise that participants will have many other commitments and pressures on their time, and business is conducted with an emphasis on incrementally addressing the topic at hand and allowing members to contribute as little, or as much, as they are able to.
Following a period of initial discussion and clarification of our aims and potential outputs, the main focus for TG3 during 2021 was the development and delivery of an international survey to assess institutional models for data stewardship. The survey itself was built and hosted on UoM’s secure Qualtrics XM survey tool, and was opened for completion in the final quarter of 2021. Over 140 completed responses were received and both the survey text and the anonymised dataset have been published openly for discovery and reuse on the Zenodo data repository:
- RDA Data Stewardship Organisational Models Survey 2021 Output Dataset
- RDA Data Stewardship Organisational Models Survey Final Offline Version
TG3 continues in its work to analyse and consider the outcome of our survey and a full report is pending and will be openly published later in 2022, alongside reports and outputs from the other task group members of our wider interest group. From a communications perspective, RDA business such as that of IGs is publicised in a variety of ways, including typical channels such as lists, email etc, but also given prominence by an ongoing and regular series of plenary events. Via TG3 we have presented at several RDA Plenaries and related webinars already on the development and analysis of our survey.
Further connections
Alongside participation in the kind of activities described above, it’s worth emphasising the value of connections made via being an active member of the RDA. Thanks to working together in TSG3, I was approached in 2020 by Angus Whyte, Senior Institutional Support Officer at the Digital Curation Centre, to ask if the University of Manchester would like to contribute to a series of case studies on data stewardship and provision of support or research that was being conducted as part of the FAIRsFAIR programme. This was a great opportunity to talk about the work done by The Library, Research IT and colleagues in data-facing Professional Services roles. The final document in the form of a FAIRsFAIR Implementation Story was published as an open resource in Zenodo:
The RDA and their close relationship with CODATA has also been instrumental in helping to arrange and facilitate a series of “train the trainer” events at UoM to introduce the concept and practice of data stewardship in late 2020. These were delivered by experienced trainers and practitioners as part of the CODATA-RDA Schools of Research Data Science strand, again with support from FAIRsFAIR [2].
In closing, I’d encourage anyone who works with research data to investigate the RDA further. I have found that gaining perspectives from peers across the world in a huge variety of organisations has been a valuable way to expand my own understanding of the state of our field and challenges that lie ahead in continuing to advocate for and support open data and open research. RDA membership is free for individuals and can help expand your network with opportunities to participate in activities and groups. Attending a plenary would give a great introduction to the wide variety of topics and issues that are addressed by this ever-growing cohort of research data professionals.