Abbreviation RDA Membership 4200+ Website www.rd-alliance.org | Type Non-profit
NGO Secretary General Mark Parsons Founded 2013 | |
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Purpose "To build the social and technical bridges that enable open sharing of data." Motto "Research data sharing without barriers" Similar National Federation of Advanc, National Information Standard, Corporation for National Research, Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Anita Borg Institute | ||
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a research community organization started in 2013 by the European Commission, the American National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Department of Innovation. Its goal is to build social and technical infrastructure to enable the open sharing of data. The RDA is a major recipient of support in the form of grants from all of its constituent members' governments.
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As of September 2016, the RDA has over 4,300 individual members from 111 countries.
Structure
The RDA's main vehicle for outputs are 18-month long working groups that generate recommendations aimed at the RDA community. In addition to working groups, interest groups with no fixed lifetime can produce either informal or "supported" outputs which carry some degree of RDA endorsement.
Meetings
The RDA organises two major plenary conferences a year that are often co-located within other international data sharing initiatives such as the 8th RDA plenary being part of "International Data Week, 2016" convened by the Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA). RDA aims to spread the plenary meetings across many of its members' locales with recent plenaries being held in Tokyo, Paris, San Diego, Amsterdam, Dublin, Washington DC and Gothenburg, Sweden. Future plenaries may be located in developing nations.
Partnerships
The RDA provides national data sharing organisations, such as the Australian National Data Service (ANDS), an "influence over the kinds of data sharing environments that Australian researchers will work with when they collaborate with international colleagues". The RDA is partnered with many major international data initiatives such as DataCite and frequently forms joint working groups with them, such as with the World Data System.