RDA stands for Research Data Alliance. It is a nice group of people who are meeting and discussing together in order to do something very close to what led to the establishment of the TCS/IP stack in the 70’s, but for the data.
In a scenario where there are not agreed directives to manage, use, re-use, produce, store and curate the data, RDA wants to establish some order and structure in all that.
So they have organized discussion, Request For Comments (RFC), suggestions about best practices, guidelines documents… and other initiatives which are now going on.
Research Data Alliance also has some “political influence” as it is also supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies, and the Australian Government.
In this scenario, they are providing nice guidelines documents which are worth of reading.
This time, I want to share their ideas about the hot issue of Data Citation (which is related to Persistent Identifiers as DOI or EPIC PID).
The citation of the data is as hot as challenging to approach. Maybe this guidelines can be a good start to establish some structured discussion in many infrastructure which need to tackle this issue.
Downloadable version of Recommendations on Making Data Citeable published