With the provisional programme from RDA’s 21st Plenary now available, we at the the RDA TIGER project thought it would be a good idea to give the community an update on the work done so far by the groups we are supporting, and how you can find out more at the TIGER-related presentations and sessions taking place at P21 as part of International Data Week.

Back in July we announced two new groups who had successfully applied for TIGER support services in the last Open Call - the ‘Policies in Research Organisations for Research Software (PRO4RS)’ WG and ‘Data representation in chemistry and materials based on harmonised, FAIR terminologies and ontologies’ WG. Both are now well along in their activities toward becoming recognised RDA Working Groups.

The PRO4RS group will have a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at P21, where they will be discussing examples of research institution policies that support research software and how the group intends to progress and engage relevant stakeholders and organisations. Meanwhile, co-chair of the ‘Data representation in chemistry and materials’ group, Gerhard Goldbeck, will present an update of the group’s focus and objectives at the ‘Building Collaborative Bridges: Fostering Collaborations within RDA’ session led by the Vocabulary Services IG. In advance of the Plenary, the group will also be meeting virtually on September 13 at 11:00 UTC. If you are interested in joining this meeting and contributing to the group, in particular to its Case Statement, please contact us at the address at the end of the blogpost.

Our six TIGER Pilot Groups will also be represented at the Plenary:

• The Community-based catalogue of requirements for trustworthy Technical Repository Service Providers (TRSPs) group is holding a BoF session, focusing on finalising its Case Statement and on finding suitable group co-chairs.
• The Alignment on multilingual vocabularies in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) group will be presenting its focus and aims, also at the above-mentioned Vocabulary Services IG session. Those interested in contributing to and joining this recently established group are also invited to join a virtual meeting being held prior to the Plenary in late September (date to be announced soon). Contact us at the address at the end of this post for more information on how to join.
• Similar to its other pilot counterparts, the initial group members of the Small Uncrewed Aircraft Vehicles (sUAV) group will be meeting on October 2 to discuss the group’s focus and the plans for its Case Statement.
• The FAIRification of Genomic Tracks group will be holding its BoF session at P21, titled ‘FAIRification of Genomic Tracks: data-driven life science through granular discovery of biological sequence annotations with uniform metadata’. The group will be holding two pre-plenary meetings in advance of the Salzburg session - with both dates and times to be decided soon - to allow for contributions for those across a variety of timezones to the group’s scope and Case Statement.
• The Global Open Research Commons (GORC) International Model WG, one of two pre-established pilot WGs, will be holding a joint session with the GORC IG. TIGER has been supporting the WG via its Communications Service in producing white papers for two audiences - Policy-makers and Funders - which will be published at IDW.
• The second of the two pre-established pilot WGs, the National PID Strategies WG will be holding a joint session with the Working with PIDs in Tools IG - ‘PID Exchange - a curated information resource for PID adopters’ - which will mark its progression from and RDA Working Group to Interest Group. The session will also discuss the maintenance of its recently published outputs, RDA National PID Strategies Guide and Checklist which the RDA TIGER Communications Service is helping to promote in the coming weeks.

As you can see, there are a lot of activities underway at the moment, with more taking place in the coming weeks and months in the lead up to P21. The reason we’re highlighting this now is to invite any and all RDA members to contribute to these groups. You can do this by registering for the Plenary (early bird rates for physical attendance covering all the International Data Week events will be available until Saturday 15 September.

We also want to invite any of you interested in contributing to any of the virtual pre-plenary meetings described above to contact us here at the RDA TIGER project at rdatigerinfo@rd-alliance.org and we can pass the relevant information to you.

This is a great opportunity to get involved in some very exciting RDA groups and avail of the support services being offered by the TIGER project.