Summary and notes from meeting in Amsterdam, September 23, 2014

Dear members of the RDA Long Tail Interest Group,

We had a very interesting and productive meeting in Amsterdam on September 23, 2014. Thanks to Laura Molloy for taking notes, which are linked to this message and to Wolfram Horstmann for helping to co-chair the meeting.

We began the meeting with a number of presentations focusing on what different strategies to encourage the deposit of datasets into repositories:

• Veerle Van den Eynden, 'Incentives for sharing research data'; Knowledge Exchange & UK Data Archive
• Stefan Kramer, American University, US
• Dimitris Koureas, Natural History Museum London, UK
• Amy L. Nurnberger, Columbia University, US
• Kerstin Lehnert, Integrated Earth Data Applications, US
• Jochen Schirrwagen, Bielefeld University, Germany

All presentations will be made available on the interest group website soon.

The second part of the meeting was devoted to a discussion about what practical activities the group could work on between now and the next RDA meeting. Several different areas were discussed including interoperability, discoverability, linking data sets across repositories, existing tools and gap analysis, incentives for deposit, costs and funding models, evidence/information about the long tail. It was clear from the discussion that there also remains a strong interest in sharing current practices, which is what we have been doing to date.

In the end, it was decided that in the coming months the group should try to tackle one of the most difficult issues around long tail data: how to mobilize, incentivize, and create an empowering environment so researchers will share their data. We will aim for some practical recommendations that can be adopted by others (for example, “ten simple things you can do at your institution”). This may not solve the problem over night, but it will help improve things.

Several people at the meeting volunteered to work on this activity. And, I’d like to invite anyone else interested to please get in touch with if me. We will start work in the coming month. We will be sure to share our progress with the rest of the group as we progress with our work.

Best, Kathleen

Kathleen Shearer
Executive Director, COAR
kathleen.shearer@coar-repositories.org
www.coar-repositories.org