Executive Director of Research Data Canada, Mark Leggott, to speak on September 23 at Bethune College
York University Libraries, in partnership with the Office of the Vice President, Research and Innovation, warmly welcome Mark Leggott, Executive
Director of Research Data Canada as part of its Library Futures Speaker Series. Mark will be addressing our roles and responsibilities as individual researchers and as a broader organization with respect to data borne of the research lifecycle. In his talk Research Data Management in the Canadian Context, Eh? Mark will draw on lessons learned from the EU context and will discuss how we might adopt best practices in the Canadian context.
Mark is the Executive Director of Research Data Canada, a stakeholder driven organization dedicated to ensuring a sustainable research data management ecosystem in Canada. Prior to that Mark was the University Librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, Founder of the open source Islandora Project, and President of discoverygarden Inc., a private company providing services for Islandora. Mark is passionate about open data, open science, and open source, and the benefits they bring to society.
The broader university community is invited to attend. Details of the talk are as follows:
Research Data Management in the Canadian Context, Eh?
Friday September 23, 2016, Bethune 320
10:00 am - 11:30 am
Society continues to grapple with the challenges of public health emergencies, such as Zika and Ebola, many of which can severely impact individuals and the organizations tasked with protecting citizens. Unfortunately our traditional modes of scholarly communication often fail to adequately support an effective approach to finding solutions to issues like these in a timely fashion. Also, as the pace of research continues to grow, it is important to ensure that data is properly stewarded, accessible and reusable, ultimately leading to the long-term preservation, re-use and reproducibility of research outputs. Funder mandates to make these outputs (including the data) openly accessible are increasingly common outside Canada. Recent developments in the EU, with the commitment to make all EU-funded articles freely available by 2020, are a good example of this trend. While Canada has not reached the same level of commitment, there are a number of recent efforts to encourage a best practice approach when it comes to scholarly communication and research data management in Canada. As generators of a substantial amount of these outputs, Canada’s universities have a critical role to play in building a sustainable research data management ecosystem. Research Data Canada (RDC), a member-driven organization representing publicly funded organizations as well as public funders, is helping to facilitate these developments. This session will discuss the efforts of RDC and partner organizations, including: CANARIE, Compute Canada, CARL Portage Network, CASRAI, the TC3+, the Leadership Council for Digital Infrastructure, and international partners. These efforts are ultimately designed to facilitate a cohesive national approach to research data management, and one based on a clearly articulated vision for supporting innovation and discovery in Canada.