Empowering collaborative action: the InvenioRDM community

Research Data Management (RDM) platforms are critical infrastructure components in today’s open science ecosystem. RDM systems support efficient and trustworthy scholarly practices and can facilitate collaborative scholarship in a manner that recognizes the entire team, providing a way to attribute contributors and their expertise. RDMs empower discovery and access, while supporting interoperability and more equitable scholarly practices. InvenioRDM is a turnkey, born-interoperable RDM repository platform and data index to empower preservation, credit, discovery, and reuse of a wide range of digital artifacts and data – enabling best practice workflows and a more accurate understanding of the activities and people needed to drive knowledge forward. InvenioRDM builds on a strong foundation of collaboration. Development is accomplished by a large, multi-national collaboration which includes the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Northwestern University, and nearly 20 other partners, representing academic, research, funding, and industry collaborators from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. Our work is user driven by carefully understanding user experience, our proactive requirements gathering, and deliberate incorporation of best practices and standards. This presentation will introduce the InvenioRDM project and describe recent progress on software development, governance, and outreach. We’ll also share how our international open source project is responding to COVID-19 challenges to keep progress moving forward, including updates to the roadmap, more robust structures to support community engagement, updated workflows and “on-ramps” for collaborators, and improved documentation and implementation resources for local adoption teams.