Natasha Simons1, Prof. Shawn Ross2
1Australian Research Data Commons, Brisbane, Australia, 2Australian Research Data Commons, Sydney, Austrlalia
Situation
Most research takes place within a ‘project’. A project can be ‘a collaborative enterprise’ (the Square Kilometre Array) or ‘a planned or proposed undertaking’ (its planned observations to explore ‘Extreme tests of general relativity’). Projects have a lifecycle, with inputs such as participants or grants, and outputs such as datasets or publications.
Projects are not currently tracked in any consistent, transparent and durable manner. The Research Activity Identifier (RAiD), a persistent identifier (PID) for projects, addresses this need.
A RAiD acts as a container for other PIDs, such as Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCiDs) or Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs), as well as essential project metadata. RAiD is set to become an ISO-certified standard, generating significant international interest. The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) is now reviewing and rebuilding the underlying infrastructure, offering an opportunity to ensure that RAiD is fit for purpose.
Task
This BoF will discuss the purpose, scope, and capabilities of RAiD as a global PID and as an ARDC service. Questions include:
What are your RAiD use cases? How do you define a ‘project’? How do you want to track projects? What information do you need to associate with a project? What are the relationships between RAiDs and other PIDs? Who should be able to mint a RAiD? What systems need to integrate with RAiD?
Action
Discuss these questions, learn from each other, and produce requirement scenarios (user stories)
Result
Inform RAiD development, shaping a usable and effective RAiD service offering from the ARDC.
Biography:
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0635-1998
Natasha Simons is Associate Director, Data & Services, for the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). She collaborates nationally and internationally to solve key challenges that improve research data infrastructure, policies, skills and practices. Natasha leads a team who are passionate about enabling FAIR data (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and driving a corresponding change in scholarly communication culture. She is responsible for delivery of ARDC’s multimillion-dollar National Data Assets Initiative that will establish strategic partnerships to develop a portfolio of national-scale data assets supporting leading-edge research. She is also the business owner of ARDC’s Research Data Australia discovery service and serves on a number of international boards and initiatives including FORCE11, Research Data Alliance and the CODATA Global Open Science Cloud. She has co-authored a book and numerous journal articles on research data challenges and solutions and is a regular presenter at research conferences and events.