New roles of research data infrastructure in research paradigm evolution

Research data infrastructures form the cornerstone in both cyber and physical spaces,driving the progression of the data-intensive scientific research paradigm.This opinion paper presents an overview of global research data infrastructure,drawing insights from national roadmaps and strategic documents related to research data infrastructure.It emphasizes the pivotal role of research data infrastructures by delineating four new missions aimed at positioning them at the core of the current scientific research and communication ecosystem.The four new missions of research data infrastructures are:(1)as a pioneer,to transcend the disciplinary border and address complex,cutting-edge scientific and social challenges with problem-and data-oriented insights;(2)as an architect,to establish a digital,intelligent,flexible research and knowledge services environment;(3)as a platform,to foster the high-end academic communication;(4)as a coordinator,to balance scientific openness with ethics needs.

On the Complexities of Federating Research Data Infrastructures

Federated Research Data Infrastructures aim to provide seamless access to research data along with services to facilitate the researchers in performing their data management tasks.During our research on Open Science(OS),we have built cross-disciplinary federated infrastructures for different types of(open)digital resources:Open Data(OD),Open Educational Resources(OER),and open access documents.In each case,our approach targeted only the resource“metadata”.Based on this experience,we identified some challenges that we had to overcome again and again:lack of(i)harvesters,(ii)common metadata models and(iii)metadata mapping tools.In this paper,we report on the challenges we faced in the federated infrastructure projects we were involved with.We structure the report based on the three challenges listed above.