RDA stands for Research Data Alliance. It is a valuable community of people meeting and working together to do for data something close to what led to the establishment of the TCP/IP stack in the 1970s. In a scenario where no agreed directives exist for managing, using, reusing, producing, storing, and curating data, RDA aims to bring order and structure. It has therefore organized discussions, Requests for Comments (RFCs), best-practice recommendations, guideline documents, and other ongoing initiatives.
The Research Data Alliance also has institutional weight, as it is supported by the European Commission, the National Science Foundation and other U.S. agencies, and the Australian Government.
In this context, RDA is producing useful guideline documents that are worth reading. This time, I want to share its work on the important issue of Data Citation, which is closely related to persistent identifiers such as DOI or EPIC PID.
Data citation is both highly relevant and difficult to address. These guidelines may be a good starting point for structured discussion in many infrastructures that need to tackle the issue.
Downloadable version of Recommendations on Making Data Citeable published