MSL on the Road: RDA in Barcelona

On April 5-7th, 2017, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) hosted their 9th plenary meeting in partnership with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS). Over the two days, participants attended and hosting working and interest group meetings  to evolve research data standards and compose recommendations for more reproducible, interoperable, and legible data management in open scientific research, and the Mozilla Science Lab was in attendance to support and document!

Read on to learn what more and sign up for the next RDA plenary to get involved!

The Conference

Started as a community initiative in 2013, the RDA formed from a collaboration between  the European Commission, the US NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Department of Innovation. It’s mission remains to design social and technical infrastructure for open data sharing, and so it is well aligned with our Mozilla Science mission to promote open science in research communities. To date, RDA boasts 5,400 members from 123 countries, and their plenary conferences serve as reunion meetings for the distributed and community driven Working Groups and nascent Interest Groups striving to set standards for research data. Recommendations and outputs from these collaborative groups and sessions are posted publicly on the RDA site, and the transparency of their working initiatives was particularly inspiring.

Researchers in-situ at the pre-conference sessions

This year, the plenary was in Barcelona, Spain, and the most salient themes of interest for the Science Lab involved interest/working groups on education and training for research data management, digital preservation, and data rescue. Projects like BioSharing.org, EOSCPilot, and Foster Open Science were featured as part of a broader european network of open science curriculum, standards documentation and initiatives to promote open practice in scientific research. Our campaigns and programs to support Data Rescue events (like Data Rescue PDX), open data sharing, events and education attest to our alignment with these topics and our interest in collaborating with standards bodies on appropriate open schema to share with all.

Conference swag + scheduling!

Curious about our ongoing initiatives, projects, and campaigns for open science? Read our awesome round-up of activities for April in this blog: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/04/20/april-mozilla-standing-science/.

RDA in Brief

Check out the links below to review conference proceedings and catch-up on the recorded sessions!

Conference after-social – Palau Reial de Pendrables

Get Involved

The Plenary was extremely welcoming to new contributors and enthusiastic about remote participants (hence the live streaming and remotely collaborative working groups), and if you’re interested in getting involved, I would suggest attending the next plenary, and reviewing the Newcomers Primer.

The next RDA Plenary will be in Montréal, Canada, September 19-21st, 2017. Join us there, and read more about it here!

Even got to see #mozfellow Joey K. Lee while in Barcelona!