Major milestone for the Research Data Alliance in Europe

Four Research Data Alliance (RDA) Recommendations for open data sharing are now published as ICT Technical specifications.

The rules on European standardization allow the European Commission to identify information and communication technology (ICT) technical specifications – that are not national, European or international standards – to be eligible for referencing in public procurement in the EU. This enables public authorities to make use of the full range of specifications when buying IT hardware, software and services, allowing for more competition in the field and reducing the risk of lock-in to proprietary systems.



PICTURE: THINKSTOCK
 

The ICT standardization effort in EU is the cornerstone of the Digital Single Market initiative, ensuring compatibility between systems and guaranteeing the competitiveness and the openness of ICT markets. ICT technical specifications are an agile tool for the European Commission to address the constantly evolving technology in ICT markets, and to realize its ambitious plans of building the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

On July 20, 2017 a Commission Decision has been adopted including four ICT specifications from the RDA, a global community-driven organization launched and supported by the European Commission together with partners from other regions of the world. RDA has the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing of research data across geographical boundaries and disciplines.

– It is very exciting to see that the RDA recommendations are recognized on the highest level in Europe. This opens exciting new opportunities for RDA in Europe to collaborate on the concept of the EOSC as well as on the global landscape on re-use of data. The next set of RDA recommendations is now processed to be recognized, says director Leif Laaksonen from CSC.

The four RDA recommendations are key building blocks for an interoperable research data environment:

The implementation and uptake of these ICT specifications will foster the industrial participation in providing cross-border and cross-regional data services in the area of research. This is in line with the European strategy of building the EOSC and a European Data Infrastructure (EDI) to bring networking, data and computing services closer to European researchers and innovators as it will allow the industry to better match its capabilities with the requirements of science.
 

For more information:

Leif Laaksonen
Director, RDA Finland
leif.laaksonen(at)csc.fi

European Commission news article
Research Data Alliance news article

RDA Europe
RDA (Research Data Alliance) Europe is the European plug-in to the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The goal of RDA is to create a global infrastructure for data: to accelerate international data-driven innovation and discovery by facilitating research data sharing and exchange. This is achieved through the development, adoption, and deployment of infrastructure, policy, practice, standards, and other deliverables. RDA is currently funded by the European Commission, the U.S. Government (NSF & NIST) and the Australian Government. CSC – IT Center for Science Ltd. is an organization member of RDA. www.rd-alliance.org