Research Data Alliance (RDA) is an international community whose primary goal is to promote the sharing and reuse of research data as well as good data management practices. The RDA’s semi-annual plenary meeting in mid-April brought together virtually 800 data management professionals. At the opening ceremony, Secretary General Hilary Hanahoe highlighted the different skills required for data management. She compared the RDA community and data workers to an orchestra that needs different kinds of musicians. The keynote speaker, Jeni Tennison, emphasized the importance of reusing research data also in a non-research context, while reminding to take into account the related realities at different stages of the data lifecycle. Research participants must be informed of the different uses and the suitability of the data for the new use must also be assessed.
More than 30 events for RDA expert groups provided an opportunity to learn, discuss and reflect on, for example, data findability, data and science communication and, the challenges of data management in multidisciplinary research, how the sustainable development goals relate to data management, and organizing research data management services. In multidisciplinary research, the challenge may arise from different ways of describing the data (i.e. metadata standards) and archiving and retrieving the data from discipline specific data archives.
