The Global Research Data Alliance community response to the global COVID-19 pandemic
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a volunteer community of over 10,500 professionals from 145 countries across the globe. In less than two months, the community responded to an urgent call for action and defined much needed, comprehensive recommendations and guidelines for data sharing under the present COVID-19 circumstances.
Today, 28 May 2020, we publish the pre-final version of the RDA COVID-19 Recommendations and Guidelines covering four research areas—clinical data, omics practices, epidemiology and social sciences. This document is also complemented by overarching areas focusing on legal and ethical considerations, research software, community participation and indigenous data.
The detailed guidelines in this body of work aim to help stakeholders follow best practices to maximise the efficiency of their work and act as a blueprint for the current and future health emergencies. The recommendations aim to help policymakers and funders maximise timely, quality data sharing and appropriate responses to health emergencies, particularly COVID-19.
The report specifically emphasises the importance of the following during the COVID-19 emergency response:
- Sharing clinical data in a timely and trustworthy manner to maximise the impact of healthcare measures and clinical research during the emergency response;
- encouraging people to publish their data alongside a paper (particularly important in reference to omics data);
- underlining that epidemiology data underpin early response strategies and public health measures;
- providing general guidelines to collect or link important social and behavioral data in all pandemic studies;
- evidencing the importance of sharing research software alongside the research data it analyses, and providing guidelines and best practices for enabling this;
- offering general guidance to navigate the applicable rule of law and exploit relevant ethical frameworks relating to the collection, analysis and sharing of data in similar emergency situations;
- looking at data management and sharing issues related to the technical, social, legal and ethical considerations from the community participation perspective.
Additional recommendations highlighted by the 200+ contributors involved in the generation of this output include:
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