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Research Data Alliance Releases Guidelines for COVID-19 Data Sharing

Posted on July 24th, 2020 by Xuanyan Xu in COVID-19

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) has released its final version of the RDA COVID-19 Recommendations and Guidelines on data sharing for COVID-19, which covers four main research areas: clinical data, omics practices, epidemiology and social sciences. The document also touches on issues like community participation, legal and ethical considerations, research software and indigenous data.

Data sharing has been absolutely critical during the pandemic, as researchers around the world have been collaborating and providing each other valuable information to fuel work on understanding COVID-19 and developing treatments. However, it is also important to have best practices to ensure data and code are accurate and shared responsibly—hence the need for the data sharing guidelines the RDA has created in the context of COVID-19.

The Research Data Alliance is an international community-driven effort supported by several governmental bodies that was founded in 2013 to help build the infrastructure needed for open data sharing and data reuse “across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.” This kind of information exchange has proven to be increasingly important not just in government and academia, but also in pharmaceutical research and development—and we’re seeing that now more than ever with the global efforts to battle coronavirus.

Elsevier is a contributing member of the RDA. We participate and deliver on the organization’s mission, by focusing on issues that relate to scientific publishing, data linking and open data (learn about our Open Data Report).

We are also proud to be contributing to open data sharing for scientists working on COVID-19 research through our Coronavirus Research Hub. Find out more here.