The increased number of data repositories has greatly increased the availability of open data. To enable broad discovery and access to research dataset, some data repositories have begun leveraging data discovery services from commercial search engines by embedding structured metadata markup in dataset web landing pages using vocabularies from Schema.org and extensions. This paper aims to examine metadata interoperability for supporting global data discovery. Specifically, the paper reports a survey on which metadata schema has been adopted by participating data repositories, and presents an analysis of crosswalks from fourteen research data schemas to Schema.org. The analysis indicates most descriptive metadata are interoperable among the schemas, the most inconsistent mapping is the rights metadata, and a large gap exists in the structural metadata and controlled vocabularies to specify various property values. The analysis and collated crosswalks can serve as a reference for data repositories when they develop crosswalks from their own schemasto Schema.org, and provide the research data community a benchmark of structured metadata implementation.
Background: The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) global pandemic required a rapid and effective response. This included ethical and legally appropriate sharing of data. The European Commission (EC) called upon the Research Data Alliance (RDA) to recruit experts worldwide to quickly develop recommendations and guidelines for COVID-related data sharing. Purpose: The purpose of the present work was to explore how the RDA succeeded in engaging the participation of its community of scientists in a rapid response to the EC request. Methods: A survey questionnaire was developed and distributed among RDA COVID-19 work group members. A mixed-methods approach was used for analysis of the survey data. Results: The three constructs of radical collaboration (inclusiveness, distributed digital practices, productive and sustainable collaboration) were found to be well supported in both the quantitative and qualitative analyses of the survey data. Other social factors, such as motivation and group identity were also found to be important to the success of this extreme collaborative effort. Conclusions: Recommendations and suggestions for future work were formulated for consideration by the RDA to strengthen effective expert collaboration and interdisciplinary efforts.
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