Machine Actionable Policy Templates - Practical Policy WG Recommendations

What you say might work in a simple, strightforward, undeveloped environment, but the actual state of affairs is probably a tad more complicated than that.

The stated goals are
(a) To bring together practitioners in policy making and policy implementation
(b) To identify typical application scenarios for policies such as replication, preservation etc.
(c) To collect and to register practical policies
(d) To enable sharing, revising, adapting, and re-using of computer actionable policies.

Now data producers (observers, research practitioners, lab workers, etc.) will, from sheer necessity of research organization, already have their own forms of data management. If there is no identifiable domain repository and handling system, then it will simply be something that works for them; and if they are not part of a grand collaboration with outside partners, then what they have will be adequate for them, so they will not cheerfully embrace a request to change 'for the common good', or certainly not unless someone comes along and does it for them. Researchers usually have objectives and date targets to meet, and their funding agencies do not expect them to use their time formatting data just so that others can use them.

If I take Astronomy as an example, an international scheme for data deposit (largely signalled by space missions but by multi-national ground-based ones too) is well established because the number of astronomers in research is relatively manageable, and because people have been working on these very problems, for the sake of sharing data, ever since astronomical data became born-digital, so the basic concepts were built in from the get-go. That is why it has been possible to build such a thing as a Virtual Observatory, whereby data sets can be made fully interoperable, and even retrofitted to that standard. But take almost any other domain, where data-survival has been more common than data management, and where the numbers of people involved are larger. Individualism will be rife, and trying to supplant it with a unified all-singing all-dancing system is going to take several revolutions and
coups. Who is going to do all that? The researcher's remit will not have changed, and there will be no fresh funding to pay for the necessary reformatting, etc. Each lab experiment will probably need a tame data-science expert to assist, and I am not sure that I can see what the justification for that extra funding will look like.

Elizabeth Griffin

The comment discusses the concept that data producers already have internal data management systems and have no incentive to share data.  The implication is that the objective of the Research Data Alliance to promote international research collaborations is not feasible.

My comments are not related to the actual work done, but instead related to the motivation and the listed benefits or goals. I reviewed the documentation through the lens of what organizations/indivdiuals do I know who are not currently members of RDA or engaged in RDA efforts who might be able to benefit from this work/output.

My suggestion would be some additional wording be added to the summary (above) to highlight the benefits or more specifically "why this might be useful to groups" - it might also be useful to take it one step further to suggest some types of organizations which might find this work useful.

I actually found much of what I was looking for in terms of benefits in Reagan's comments above so that could be reused/tailed quite easily/effectively. I would agree with Elizabeth's comments in that using policies such as what is noted above from the perpsective of an individual researcher or research group could be quite challenging. However, within my jurisdiction I am seeing more and more of these researchers relying on data service providers to provide the necessary infrastructure and services to support data management. The more of these service providers that implement comment policies such as what is stated in this outcome could help drive scalability, interoperability (and the other benefits suggested by Reagan).

Cheers,

Jill