In a presentation at the monthly Data Sharing and Reuse seminar for The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy in March, Carole Goble (ELIXIR-UK) and Frederik Coppens (ELIXIR-BE) laid out the aims and future direction of the ELIXIR RDMkit. 

The ELIXIR RDMkit (https://rdmkit.elixir-europe.org) is a toolkit built by the biosciences community, for the biosciences community to provide the RDM information they need. It is a framework for advice and best practice for RDM and acts as a hub of RDM information, with links to tool registries, training materials, standards, and databases, and to services that offer deeper knowledge for DMP planning and FAIR-ification practices.

Launched in March 2021, over 120 contributors have provided nearly 100 pages of content and links to more than 300 tools. Content covers the data lifecycle and specialized domains in biology, national considerations and examples of “tool assemblies” developed to support RDM. It has been accessed by over 123 countries, and the top of the access list is … the United States.

The RDMkit is already a recommended resource of the European Commission. The platform, editorial, and contributor methods helped build a specialized sister toolkit for infectious diseases as part of the recently launched BY-COVID project. The toolkit’s platform is the simplest we could manage - built on plain GitHub - and the whole development and contribution approach tailored to be as lightweight and sustainable as possible.

In their talk, Carole and Frederik present the RDMkit; aims and context, content, community management, how folks can contribute, and our future plans and potential prospects for trans-Atlantic cooperation.

You can watch the presentation here, as well as view the slides here.