status: Recognised & Endorsed

Chair (s): Robert Downs, LILi Zhang, Devan Ray Donaldson

Group Email: [group_email]

Secretariat Liaison: [field_secretariat_liaison]


Context and purpose

Research data repositories are at the heart of data sharing as they provide platforms to acquire, store, archive, publish, curate, preserve, and access data. Thus, the major goal of the Repository Platforms for Research Data (RPRD) Interest Group (IG) is to improve the usability and technical capabilities of repository platforms. To achieve this, the RPRD IG invites members of the research data community to collect usage experiences, define requirements, evaluate implementations, and identify limitations of current solutions in a cooperation of repository users, managers, providers, and developers. Possible outputs of our efforts might be recommendations, knowledge collections, or new working groups to investigate identified issues.

    

Working towards better repositories

The original charter of the Repository Platforms for Research Data Interest Group (RPRD IG), formed at RDA Plenary 5 in March 2015, was to "gather and analyze research data use cases in the context of repository platform requirements. The primary deliverable was a matrix relating use cases with functional requirements for repository platforms."

This matrix, along with an accompanying document on how it was created, was finalized and published in Nov. 2016, and can also be found under RDA Supporting Outputs.

 

We welcome your contributions!

The RPRD IG's focus is the collection of experiences with selecting, implementing, and using specific research data repository platforms/products across institutions and domains, with reference to the aforementioned functional requirements. From this, the IG may identify potential gaps between needs and solutions in the current research data repository environment, and will seek opportunities to propose the formation of new RDA working groups to address them.

The group is open for participation to any RDA member (see the "Join Group" link on this page).

 

Timeline

  • April 2019 - RDA Plenary 13 (Philadelphia) - joint meeting with IG Research Data Architectures in Research Institutions (RDARI) on a possible working group on access to data in interoperable repositories for data analytics
  • November 2018 - RDA Plenary 12 (Botswana) - meeting on two possible topics for further work: Data Policy Enforcement and Data Analytics Support
  • March 2018 - RDA Plenary 11 (Berlin) - meeting to identify, explore, and plan for future contributions of the IG - identified four possible topics

Plenary participation

13
February
2024

Data Review in Data Repositories to Facilitate Open Science

Introduction to Joint Session on Data Review in Data Repositories for Open Science - (~5 Minu

07
June
2023

Data Repositories Discovering Unpublished and Diverse Data Usage and Impact

The Joint Session of the Repository Platforms for Research Data (RPRD) IG and the Domain Repositories IG explores the challenges for identifying the use and impact of data disseminated by repositories. Often, the results of using data go undiscovered. Likewise, the impact of research data that is used in unexpected ways may not be measurable. Presentations in this joint session describe these challenges along with approaches that data repositories from various disciplines have employed to assess the use and impact of the data products and services that they disseminate. A rich discussion among data stakeholder of such challenges and approaches will offer repositories with opportunities for exploring, evaluating, and implementing ways of identifying and measuring the use and impact of data that they disseminate.