The workshop “Towards RDA Iberia” was hold last April 4, as an associated event to the RDA (Research Data Alliance) Plenary Conference in Barcelona. The event was organized by Maredata, the Spanish Supercomputing Network and INESC TEC – University of Porto. The main objective was to start working in the creation of a RDA regional branch that gather all the Portuguese and Spanish research data stakeholders.
This event was a great success and nearly 100 participants attended the different sessions. The first panel focused on the open science policies and showed the institutional support for RDA Iberia. The participants on the round table were Augusto Burgueño (Head of Unit “eInfrastructure”, Directorate General for Communication Networks, Content and Techn. European Commission), Maria Fernanda Rollo (Secretária de Estado da Ciência, Tecnologia e Ensino Superior, Portugal) and Clara Eugenia García (Directora General de Política de Investigación, Desarrollo e Innovación, Spain). Among other questions, the panellists highlighted the crucial role of standards in research data and discussed about the current indicators to assess research excellence.
Alfonso Valencia, the Life Sciences department director in Barcelona Supercomputing Center, chaired the second session. In this panel, eight researchers explained the challenges and needs to share research data in their scientific areas. Some points addressed were the difficulties associated to big datasets, the needs for infrastructures, the interoperability and the legal aspects related to data privacy.
In the last session, the panellists presented other regional RDA initiatives that are currently running (RDA Italy, RDA Germany & Austria and RDA UK) to learn about these experiences. The speakers emphasised that it is important to start working in the financing schemes and the legal structure to define the operating model of RDA Iberia.
In conclusion, the workshop was a first and plural meeting among the main research data stakeholders and was useful to share the priorities from the different points of view: policymakers, research groups and data professionals. The RDA initiative has the supports needed to start working and overcome the barriers to open and share the research data.
You can see some tweets as an overview of the workshop in Storify.
