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publications as the only type of research outputs and aims to establish cost-
effective, collaborative data infrastructures to support the access, discovery, and
sharing of research data for multidisciplinary research communities. The project
has the objective to build a solid foundation—in terms of scale, scope, domain,
practices, and others—that allows heterogeneous research communities to share
research data and to preserve these in the long-term.
The main users of the EUDAT infrastructure are experts who need to collaborate
in demanding research projects or validate research results that were produced by
other scientists. To define a set of cross-community, common services for data shar-
ing and management, EUDAT has worked closely with thematic research communi-
ties (e.g., Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure [CLARIN],
LifeWatch, European Plate Observing System [EPOS], European Network for Earth
System Modeling [ENES], Virtual Physiological Human [VPH]).*
The project is organized into dedicated working groups to deal with the man-
agement of massive generation of real-time data from research facilities, instru-
ments and sensors, the definition of data workflows for sophisticated services,
the required semantics to let researchers annotate research data in consistent and
interoperable ways, and, most important, the establishment of policies regarding
data access and reuse. The latter was extremely challenging, as stated by partners
of the EUDAT consortium, due to the need of harmonizing diverse open data and
data access policies as well as devising a common licensing scheme to set pragmatic
ways for opening, accessing, and sharing cross-domain research data.
13.2.2.3 Research Data Alliance
The RDA is an international initiative launched in March 2013 and jointly funded
by the EC, the U.S. National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards
and Technology, and the Australian Government's Department of Innovation. The
RDA aims to accelerate and facilitate research data sharing and exchange, use,
and reuse; standards harmonization; and discoverability. This will be achieved by
quickly creating and adopting focused pieces of code, policy, infrastructure, stan-
dards, or best practices that enable data to be shared and exchanged now.
To achieve its objectives, the RDA provides the framework for the creation and
coordination of working groups, proposed by its members, to address interoper-
ability issues across disciplines. Such groups are meant to help build consensus and
establish partnerships across communities on objectives of common interest.
Due to its worldwide participation and support, the RDA can greatly contrib-
ute to the adoption of consistent data management and sharing principles across
the scientific communities. However, the effective and consistent governance of an
initiative of the size of the RDA poses a number of issues, for example, preventing
duplication and/or fragmentation of efforts and monitoring whether and how RDA
*
http://www.eudat.eu/eudat-communities.
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