Rob Quick, program manager for the RDA-US Targeted International working GRoup United States (TIGRUS) facilitation program announced two groups who have accepted to be part of the TIGRUS pilot. The TIGRUS Program leverages RDA’s Working Group structure to address data challenges happening within the US.
The first group in the pilot is the National PID Strategies WG. A Persistent Unique Identifier (PID) is a string of letters and numbers used to distinguish between and locate different objects, people, or concepts. A well-known example of a PID is a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) which is used to locate specific digital objects, frequently a journal article.
The work of this group follows the RDA National PID Strategies WG which created an RDA National PID Strategies Guide and Checklist. Within the Guide, the working group concluded “All national PID strategies are currently in development and therefore subject to a high degree of change. During the course of the WG, nine case studies were collected and several of these needed to be updated prior to the Group’s final output due to changes that had taken place in those countries.” So the main goal of this TIGRUS-facilitated group is to develop a national PID strategy for the United States. It is co-chaired by Todd Carpenter, National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and John Chodacki, California Digital Library, University of California Office of the President, and RDA-US.
Utilizing the framework created by the Research Data Alliance, the group published a report, Developing a US National PID Strategy, in March 2024 which was created in collaboration with members of the Higher Education Leadership Initiative for Open Scholarship (HELIOS Open) and the Community Effort on Research Output Tracking workstreams organized by the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG).
The report outlines the benefits of PIDs, their associated metadata, and the systems that connect them in advancing open scholarship goals in the United States. It provides information on the research and policy landscape associated with PIDs, discusses the value of PID infrastructure, and offers recommendations for effective utilization of PIDs in connecting and tracking research outputs. Ideally, this guidance will be widely adopted by organizations throughout the research ecosystem in the US and potentially adapted globally in other national contexts around the world, as part of a growing movement to deploy national persistent identifier strategies.
The second group in the pilot is the Common Standard for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans WG. This working group is based on the RDA DMP Standards WG who published a report, RDA DMP Common Standard for Machine-actionable Data Management Plans, in September 2020 and work follows with the development of DMP Tool by California Digital Library (CDL) in the US.
The report summary states Data Management Plans are free-form text documents describing the data that is used and produced during the course of research activities. They specify where the data will be archived, which licenses and constraints apply, and to whom credit should be given, etc. The workload and bureaucracy often associated with traditional DMPs can be reduced when they become machine-actionable.
The DMP Common Standards WG has developed an application profile that allows to express information from traditional DMPs in a machine-actionable way. It allows for automatic exchange, integration, and validation of information provided in DMPs. Thus, it facilitates exchange of information between systems acting on behalf of stakeholders involved in the research life cycle, such as, researchers, funders, repository managers, ICT providers, librarians, etc.
This report summarizes the application profile. The full specification can be found: https://github.com/RDA-DMP-Common/RDA-DMP-Common-Standard.
TIGRUS will work with Maria Praetzellis, Associate Director, and others from the California Digital Library UC3 (UC Creation Center) to move the work of the DMPTool forward in the US.
RDA-US and TIGRUS is supported by Indiana University’s (IU) Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI). PTI, is IU’s flagship organization for research and development in cyberinfrastructure, informatics, and computer science in support of science and engineering research, scholarship, and cybersecurity.
To learn more contact TIGRUS program manager, Rob Quick, or the RDA-US Program Manager, Robert Ping.