Research Data Alliance (RDA)

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a global, community-driven organisation launched in March 2013 by the European Commission, the US National Science Foundation, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian government, with the mission of building the social and technical bridges that let researchers and innovators openly share and re-use data across technologies, disciplines, and countries. It is not a standards body in the ISO or NISO sense and does not own or operate research infrastructure itself; it is a membership organisation — as of March 2025 counting more than 15,000 individual members from over 150 countries — that convenes the people who build and govern that infrastructure elsewhere.

RDA’s work happens inside two main group types. Working Groups are time-bounded, typically chartered for around 18 months, and are expected to produce a concrete, implementable deliverable — a schema, a specification, a piece of guidance. Interest Groups have no fixed end date and instead coordinate ongoing discussion, surveys, and community-building around a topic, sometimes spinning off Working Groups to tackle specific deliverables. A smaller number of Communities of Practice address discipline-specific challenges, and informal Birds of a Feather sessions at RDA’s Plenary meetings are where new groups often get proposed. Governance runs through a Council, a Technical Advisory Board, Organisational and Regional Advisory Boards, and a Secretariat led by a Secretary General. Group outputs are not all equal in status: an RDA Recommendation is the flagship, Council-endorsed result of a Working Group that has been through formal community review; a Supporting Output — reviewed by the Technical Advisory Board rather than formally endorsed by Council — covers guidelines, white papers, and other outputs judged useful but not yet “adoptable” in the same formal sense.

Because RDA is a convening organisation rather than a single standard, it is easy to conflate “RDA” with one of the many things its groups have produced. It isn’t the FAIR4RS Principles, which are a 2022 output of one RDA working group; it isn’t the RDA DMP Common Standard or its DMP RDA-JSON-LD serialisation, produced by another; and it isn’t the PIDINST metadata schema for identifying research instruments, an RDA Recommendation since March 2022. Each of those is a separate, citable, dated deliverable of a specific RDA group — RDA itself is the standing organisation, membership, and process that produced all of them. RDA also sits alongside, rather than inside, other research-information governance bodies: see euroCRIS for the parallel not-for-profit that stewards CERIF and CRIS interoperability, and CASRAI’s own RDA federation page for how CASRAI cross-walks its vocabularies against specific RDA working-group outputs.

RDA’s PID-focused work is discussed in more depth in CASRAI’s guide to persistent identifier federation across research infrastructure, which covers RDA’s Persistent Identifier Interest Group as the longest-running cross-community PID coordination forum. Its role in research-software citation is covered in the guide to reproducibility infrastructure, which cites the FAIR4RS Principles RDA approved in June 2022. See also the Persistent Identifiers & Research Information Systems pillar for how RDA fits alongside other identifier and research-information standards bodies.

References

• Research Data Alliance, “About the RDA” (rd-alliance.org/about)
• Research Data Alliance, “Recommendations and Outputs” (rd-alliance.org/recommendations-and-outputs)
• Chue Hong, N. et al., “FAIR Principles for Research Software (FAIR4RS Principles)”, RDA, 2022. DOI: 10.15497/RDA00068
• Research Data Alliance, “Persistent Identification of Instruments WG” (rd-alliance.org/groups/persistent-identification-instruments-wg)