RDA Groups

Introduction

The Research Data Architectures in Research Institutions Interest Group is primarily concerned with technical architectures for managing research data within universities and other multi-disciplinary research institutions. It provides insight into the approaches being taken to the development and operation of such architectures and their success or otherwise in enabling good practice.

SHARC is a recognised and endorsed interest group within RDA (Research Data Alliance).  It is an interdisciplinary group seeking to unpack and improve crediting and rewarding mechanisms for open science activities and in particular, for the data/resources sharing process. It aims to provide guidance for researchers and recommendations to all key actors of the academic recognition ecosystem.

Update: In the immediate much of our disucssions are happening on this Slack channel, to join see this link

We are proposing a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Data (SSHRD) Interest Group under the auspices of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), to foster diverse professional exchange on issues particular to data originating from the social sciences and humanities. 

It is the objective of this group to i) discuss the nature of information ii) characterize the variant concepts in different fields and iii) evaluate to conequences for research data management.

The vision of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) is that “researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.” The Mission of RDA is that it “builds the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data.”

Increasingly researchers who are not co-located are seeking to work dynamically together at various scales from the local to global using the internet to share data, models, workflows, best practice, publications, management and administration of their research etc. The Virtual Research Environments Interest Group (VRE-IG) seeks to build the required technical bridges, skills and social communities that enable global sharing and processing of data across technologies, disciplines and countries through the creation of shared online virtual environments. As these individual VREs grow, inevitably they need to also connect with major national research infrastructures.

The goal of the VRE-IG is to identify the technical issues to and - where known - share solutions that enable online access to data required to address issues that can range from local challenges (which are also potentially of direct relevance to researchers in other geographical areas or other research domains), to the research grand challenges currently being faced by society on global issues, e.g., societal impacts of climate change; sustainable cities; and environmentally sensitive utilisation of the scarce resources of our planet.

Lack of interoperability between tools/e-infrastructures presents a significant barrier to streamlining processes throughout the research lifecycle. These gaps prevent the comprehensive collection and incorporation of research data and metadata into the research record captured during the active research phase. Furthermore, it limits the scope for passing this data and metadata on to data repositories, thus undermining FAIR data principles and reproducibility.