Open access, open data and now open science and open innovation have become key funding themes, especially in the European Commission and the Horizon 2020 future work plans. The ACU has been heavily involved in creating a global Research Data Alliance that seeks to deliver the benefits from the open science movement – researchers from over 100 countries have participated over the last two years.

The final review of the first Research Data Alliance-Europe project has just been completed, and the project has received a very positive evaluation. The review report identifies a number of important achievements, and states:

‘The result is that RDA-Europe now stands as one of the major components of an organization that aims at spanning the entire planet in order to facilitate the capturing, preservation, curation and re-use of scientific data… We are witnessing the emergence of a worldwide organization that could do to data what the Internet, in a sense, did to computers: the very nature and meaning of these devices changed when they were networked, and so will the nature and meaning of data when they can be reused and remixed at will in any area of knowledge creation.’

One of the outputs of the Research Data Alliance-Europe project was the production of The Data Harvest report (chaired by Professor John Wood, Secretary General of the ACU). This report was presented to ministers in Rome in December 2014, and is already having a major impact on future funding plans.

For more information about the ACU’s role in the Research Data Alliance, contact Dr Andy Cherry at [email protected]