ReSA becomes an RDA affiliate

ReSA and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) have recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding to clearly announce their intention to coordinate their efforts in areas and activities that involve both research data and software.

RDA aims to accelerate international data-driven innovation and discovery by facilitating research data sharing and exchange. This is achieved through the development, adoption, and deployment of infrastructure, policy, practice, standards, and other deliverables. The emphasis of RDA is the adoption and deployment of research data solutions, rather than the development of new infrastructure. The work of RDA is primarily undertaken through its working groups. Participation in working groups and interest groups, starting new working groups, and attendance at the twice-yearly plenary meetings is open to all individuals who subscribe to the RDA Guiding Principles.

ReSA will become an Organisational Affiliate of RDA, collaborating with the RDA Council and Technical Advisory Board and RDA Organisational Advisory Board, and may vote in their elections. In turn, RDA will collaborate with ReSA’s governing body, including providing updates to ReSA on plans and activities that are directly relevant to ReSA members. Both organisations will cross-promote relevant news, activities, and events to their international communities.

ReSA responds to US government request for information

ReSA recently submitted a response to a US government request for information on “Public Access to Peer-Reviewed Scholarly Publications, Data and Code Resulting From Federally Funded Research”. The response provided ReSA with an opportunity to inform approaches for ensuring broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications, data, and code that result from federally-funded scientific research. ReSA’s submission focuses on how improving the recognition and value of research software can increase the access to unclassified published research, digital scientific data, and code supported by the US Government.

Recommendations for policy makers, funders and publishers

The RDA-COVID19 WG is continuing its rapid outputs, releasing the fourth revision of the guidelines last week. This includes overarching recommendations on software best practice for policy makers and funders, publishers and the research community responding to COVID-19. Sign up to the RDA COVID19-software email list for more information.

FAIR for Research Software update

The community can now comment on the case statement for this group, which includes the milestone for the next 18 months. Community consultation will be a major part of this work, so signup to the FAIR4RS mailing list to stay in the loop.

The FAIR For Research Software Working Group (FAIR4RS WG) is being jointly convened as an RDA Working Group, FORCE11 Working Group, and ReSA Taskforce. FAIR4RS WG will enable coordination of a range of existing community-led discussions on how to define and effectively apply FAIR principles to research software, to achieve adoption of these principles.

Community news

Over the last year, the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) has convened a reproducibility badging working group formed of representatives from publishers, professional societies, and the research community. This has included ReSA’s Neil Chue Hong.

This group is now seeking comments from the community on the draft recommended practice document they have produced, Reproducibility Badging and Definitions. This document provides a set of recommended badges to be universally deployed across the scholarly publishing ecosystem to recognise different aspects and stages of making research outputs available, open, reviewable and reproducible in a way that will be easily understood by all. Comments will be accepted through June 18, 2020. Comments are welcomed from potential users and implementors of the recommendations, so we are particularly keen for members of the ReSA community with an interest in FAIR or reproducible research, and those who are part of an editorial team for a journal or conference proceedings to provide feedback.

Can you assist Zenodo curate software entries in their COVID-19 community? The COVID-19 Open Research Gateway has been established by OpenAIRE, European Commission, ELIXIR, EMBL and RDA to provide a single entry point to COVID-19 resources. Together with CERN, OpenAIRE has created a Zenodo COVID-19 Community to collect all research results that could be relevant for the scientific community worldwide working on the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and SARS-CoV-2. If you’d like to assist with curation then fill out the submission form.

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