Thoughts on the Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary

The Research Data Alliance 6th Plenary last week discussed numerous topics very relevant to DataCite. Below is a short subjective list of topics I found interesting. If you attended RDA, feel free to add your thoughts in the comments. And if you didn't attend, you can still provide feedback.

Interoperability between Persistent Identifiers

The Persistent Identifiers IG discussed the different persistent identifier activities in various RDA working and interest groups. The EC-funded THOR project that started in June was presented by Josh Brown from ORCID and Trisha Cruse from DataCite. I presented the DataCite perspective on persistent identifier interoperability. One important shortcoming of many persistent identifiers including DataCite DOI names is that only one organization – the publisher - can update the metadata. What is also needed is a claim store where multiple organizations and not just the publisher can deposit links between different persistent identifiers, e.g. citations, funding information, ORCID identifiers, etc. CrossRef and DataCite are working on such a claim store (more info here and here).

Data repository registries

Several sessions discussed repositories that collect information about data repositories. re3data is one of the more important initiatives in this space, and will become a DataCite service in 2016. One critical step is persistent identifiers for data repositories that are used across data services, including the DataCite Metadata Store.

Dynamic Data Citation

Unfortunately I missed the session of the Data Citation WG - I presented in the parallel RDA/WDS Publishing Data Bibliometrics WG. But I had interesting discussions about this topic durig the coffee breaks. I need to better understand the proposed solutions and how they fit into DataCite's existing infrastructure.

Data Packages

The Data packages BoF was organized by Rufus Pollock from the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN), and he kindly invited me to present my perspective. This is an exciting topic and look for more on this topic in a future blog post.

Publishing Data Services

The RDA/WDS Publishing Data Services presented their work on a data - literature linking service. DataCite has worked closely with CrossRef on this topic since last year, and it was good to see a lot of overlap in the approaches taken, e.g. using the relationType vocabulary from the DataCite Metadata Schema.

Data Citation

On the last day of RDA I gave a short presentation in the Joint meeting of RDA/WDS Publishing Data WGs and IGs, summarizing some of the challenges implementing data citation:

In the session we had a good discussion on how to move forward with the work started by the working group and its various interest groups.

Acknowledgments

This blog post was originally published on the DataCite Blog.