This year’s conference theme — “Aligning data and research infrastructure” — touches upon the international and interdisciplinary requirements of aligning data and research infrastructure. The 2013 OECD Global Science Forum report on New Data for Understanding the Human Condition identifies key challenges to international data collaboration that beg for new solutions. Among these challenges is the mounting pressure for new forms of social science data. In today’s abundance of personal data, new methods are being sought to combine traditional social science data, such as administrative, survey, and census data, with new forms of personal data, including social networking, biomarkers or transaction data, or with data from other domains. Similar challenges have been identified in the scientific data realm and the need for open data, archiving, and long term curation infrastructures to allow replication and/or reuse are challenges posed by funders in all areas. What alignments are needed between data and research infrastructure to enable these possibilities?
The international research community is in the midst of building a global data ecosystem that consists of a mixture of domain data repositories, data archives, data libraries, and data services and that seeks ways to facilitate data discovery, integration, access, and preservation. Evidence of this transformation is found in the recently established ICSU World Data System and in the Research Data Alliance. Like IASSIST, these organizations are contributing to the development of a global data ecosystem. Alignment, or unification of strategies, must take place at many levels to achieve this. How do we proceed? What advancements are needed in research data management, research infrastructure, and the development of new expertise?
- For more details, see the complete call for papers document.