The RDA Bulgarian National Node aims to support and coordinate participation of Bulgarian institutions, organisations and individual members in the Research Data Alliance. It is a national RDA node established to act as a long-term central contact point between the Research Data Alliance and data practitioners, funding organizations, research agencies and other relevant stakeholders in Bulgaria. Serving Bulgarian researchers and research organisations, it aims to provide them proper guidance and support in order to meet Research Data Management (RDM) requirements of the European research programs.
The RDA Node Bulgaria is coordinated by Sofia University, Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics. The RDA Node Bulgaria aims to cooperate and collaborate with all interested stakeholders from Bulgaria, such as relevant institutions and research data infrastructures, individual researchers, research organisations, companies and other interested partners (see Get Involved).
About the Research Data Alliance
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is an international volunteer member-based organisation and as such encourages the initiative and support of its members across the globe to animate their community on a national level.
The RDA Vision is researchers and innovators to openly share data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
RDA Europe national node are part of the RDA Europe support programme whose aim is to interact with researchers and innovators in the local language, offering them a platform for exchange of information pertinent to the RDA and their activities and in strict compliance with RDA's guiding principles of Openness, Transparency, Consensus-based, Community driven, Harmonisation and Non-profit. The national pages should not be interpreted as an official representation of the Research Data Alliance in any country or any organisation unless this is specifically stated.
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is an international initiative that was launched as a community-driven organization at the first RDA Plenary in Gothenburg, Sweden, in March 2013 by the European Commission, the United States National Science Foundation and National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation with the goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing of data. You can find a list of its funders here.
RDA is supported by the Secretariat, and three governance bodies: Council, Technical Advisory Board (TAB), and Organisational Advisory Board (OAB).
RDA Bulgarian node objectives
The general objectives of the RDA Bulgarian Node are to promote research data management (RDM) principles in the country, to raise awareness about RDA and Open Science activities in Bulgaria and to support the rise of data sharing culture. More specifically, providing a national platform for collaboration and cooperation, the RDA Bulgarian node aims to:
- Promote RDA membership among Bulgarian research community, across scientific domains and within diverse research data organisations;
- Represent Bulgarian interests in the RDA Interest/Working groups and governing structures;
- Raise awareness of RDA activities, events and funding calls while encouraging active involvement of new Bulgarian members in RDA activities;
- Promote RDA’s nationally relevant outputs, recommendations, and ICT Technical specifications in order to stimulate their adoption in the Bulgarian research environment;
- Contribute to the implementation of the policy of open science and open access to research data at a national level;
- Interact with national research funding bodies, ministries, and other relevant government officials to influence the implementation of an effective and durable open research data policy and digital research agendas;
- Promote and support data management best practices, standards and solutions in the Bulgarian research area;
- Promote data citation, sharing rewards and crediting best practices amongst Bulgarian publishers and stimulating the development of journal policies of research data deposit in connection to a paper publication.