Title: The Research Data Alliance: Building Bridges to Enable Scientific Data Sharing,
Abstract: The Research Data Alliance is an international organization which aims at
building the technical and sociological bridges that enable the open sharing of
scientific data. It is a remarkable forum to discuss all the aspects of
scientific data sharing with colleagues from all around the world: in November
2016, it has 4 500 members from 115 countries. The biannual Plenary meetings,
which gather several hundred participants, are rotating between different
regions. The March 2017 one will be held in Barcelona and the September 2017
one in Montreal, after Tokyo and Denver in 2016. The RDA work is organized
bottom-up, with Working Groups which have 18 months to produce implementable
deliverables and Interest Groups which serve as platforms of communication and
discussion and also produce important outputs such as surveys and
recommendations. There are currently 27 Working Groups and 45 Interest Groups,
tackling a wide diversity of subjects, including community needs, reference for
sharing, data stewardship and services, and topics related to the base
infrastructure of data sharing. Some scientific communities use the RDA as a
neutral forum to define their own disciplinary data sharing framework, with
major successes such as the Wheat Data Interoperability Working Group which
worked in coordination with the International Wheat Initiative. Astronomy has
the IVOA to define its interoperability standards, and so we do not need to
create a Group for that purpose in the RDA. But many topics discussed in the
RDA have a strong interest for us, for instance on data citation or
certification of data repositories. We have a lot to share from what we have
learnt in building our disciplinary global data infrastructure; we also have a
lot to learn from others. The paper discusses RDA current themes or results of
interest for astronomy data providers, and current liaisons with astronomy.