Data sharing, data resilience, and PID strategies in the US – connecting with our community in Washington, DC

How do we ensure a robust and sustainable environment for research data management and sharing? What infrastructure, policies, and community engagement are needed to make that vision a reality? To address these questions, we brought together the US research data management (RDM) community in Washington, DC, for a DataCite Connect event collocated with an RDA-US community gathering. A diverse group of over 30 participants came together, including DataCite community members as well as RDA-US colleagues,  to network, discuss shared challenges, and learn from one another's experiences. The event convened a panel of speakers to examine the current landscape of research data in the US. It focused on the need for a resilient data ecosystem, highlighting challenges around support for research data management costs, and emphasising the role that open research infrastructure plays in data discovery and reuse through persistent identifiers (PIDs) and rich metadata provision.

We started the session with an overview of DataCite’s ongoing work to provide open infrastructure for the research data management community and highlighted DataCite's new metadata dashboards as a tool for organizations to monitor metadata quality and explore opportunities for improvement.

Cynthia Hudson Vitale from Johns Hopkins University presented the outcomes of the Realities of Academic Data Sharing (RADS) Initiative. This longitudinal study explored service and cost models employed by institutions to support RDM activities, as well as expenses associated with federally mandated data-sharing policies. 

Next, Todd Carpenter from the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) outlined the latest developments in the US national PID strategy. Todd shared how the collaboration between RDA-US and NISO was driving progress toward a scholarly PID standard – an important prerequisite for a common framework that would support a national PID policy.

Finally, Maryam Zaringhalam from the Center for Open Science emphasized the importance of a research data ecosystem that is resistant to single points of failure. Maryam introduced a strategic plan being developed by the newly formed Coalition for Resilient Research Data Infrastructure that centers on shared governance and cross-sectoral collaboration to address this problem together.

The panel was followed by an engaging discussion, with participants sharing ideas on how to bring these initiatives to their own work, exploring what is needed from the community to ensure their success, and the role DataCite can play in supporting them. We recognized that advancing data sharing in the US will require policy alignment, sustainable investment in RDM, and strengthening collaboration across sectors to ensure broad adoption and long-term success. Our conversations continued throughout the casual networking reception afterwards, as we socialized and connected over mutual interests and experiences.

We thank all the speakers and attendees for their valuable contributions. We enjoyed meeting you all at DataCite Connect DC, and we look forward to engaging with other community members in person at future meetings and events, including at DataCite Connect in Singapore during the FORCE11 conference in June.