Data Description

Please note:  this is the landing page for the 5 draft versions of the RDA COVID-19 Working Group Recommendations and Guidelines on Data Sharing. These materials are made available following the RDA guiding principle of openness, to allow members and the wider community to view the progression of the document as well as comments received during the 5 review cycles. 

The final version of the document can be found:

The demand for better reproducibility of research results is growing. More and more data is becoming available online. In some cases, the datasets have become so large that downloading the data is no longer feasible. Data can also be offered through web services and accessed on demand.

Data versioning is a fundamental element to ensuring the reproducibility of research. Work in other RDA groups on data provenance and data citation, as well as the W3C Dataset Exchange Working Group, have highlighted that definitions of data versioning concepts and recommended practices are still missing.

This document describes the outputs of a joint RDA-Force11 FAIRsharing WG: the FAIRsharing resource of interlinked records on standards (for identifying, reporting, citing data and metadata), databases (repositories and knowledge-bases) and data policies (from journals, publishers, funders and other organizations), ranging from the generic and multi-disciplinary, to those from specific domains. The FAIRsharing recommendations, to guide the users and producers of standards, databases and repositories on how to best select and describe these resources; and to guide funders and publishers on how to recommend them in data policies. These outputs are tightly bound together as the registry enacts the recommendations, through the provision of well-described and interlinked records, which are curated and maintained with the support and input of the producers of these resources.