Taylor & Francis strengthens its partnership with the Research Data Alliance (RDA)

Taylor & Francis has joined the Research Data Alliance (RDA) as an organizational member, strengthening ties with a leading data organization that is focused on facilitating data reuse and open data sharing.

RDA is a multi-stakeholder community who work collaboratively and creatively together to overcome barriers to data sharing. The key players in the RDA community are researchers, librarians, data professionals, repositories, infrastructure groups and publishers. Taylor & Francis colleagues have been involved in RDA working groups for many years, chairing or participating working groups on data sharing policies, repository guidance and handling specific subject-based data. This enhanced partnership highlights our shared goal of supporting researchers to openly share data in order to improve discoverability, reproducibility and quality of research.

Taylor & Francis is committed to helping researchers to share their data and in recent years has acted to:

• Make data sharing become the norm. A framework of five data sharing policies was launched in 2018. This multi-level approach allows each journal to select a policy that best fits with the community’s needs. Over 2,000 journals are now on a data policy. We are also the first publisher to introduce a data policy across our books content, enabling authors of books and individual chapters to share their research data.
• Support data sharing across disciplines. Taylor & Francis partners with subject communities, such as Earth Sciences, to support emerging FAIR practices wherever possible, and co-chairs the STM Research Data Project Humanities working group along with other publishers to explore better solutions for data sharing in humanities and social sciences.
• Comply with FAIR principles. To encourage data sharing of all types of data, F1000’s open research publishing platform, F1000Research, launched the industry’s first open and FAIR data policy in 2013, framed around the FAIR principles The policy requires authors to make all data underlying their articles openly available from the moment of publication of the article.
• Maximize the potential of research data. Researchers can now choose to publish a data note in a selection of Taylor & Francis journals or with F1000Research. This gives credit to data producers with a citable, peer-reviewed publication, and supports new research collaborations across disciplines.
• Provide tailored guidance and best practice. Researcher knowledge is one of the main barriers to data sharing. A wide range of online resources have been developed to help researchers build data sharing into their research workflow seamlessly and effectively.

Matt Cannon, Head of Open Research at Taylor & Francis, commented: ‘We’re really proud of the progress we’ve made on data sharing and very excited about the opportunities this new partnership brings.  Open data plays a key role in open research. We are keen to work closely with RDA and make more collective progress by pioneering new approaches on data sharing and helping enable a responsible open data environment for researchers.’

Hillary Hanahoe, Secretary General at RDA, said: ‘We’re delighted to welcome Taylor & Francis as the newest member of our Organizational Member “family”. Taylor & Francis has been working with RDA for many years and this organizational and financial commitment to the RDA and its global community is warmly welcomed. I see this as further consolidation of a wonderful collaboration with Taylor & Francis and their recognition of the importance of community-driven data sharing and re-use outputs.’