(Source: CASRAI.org)

2017 CASRAI Working Groups (WGs) started their work in January 2017. These WGs will work virtually through March on their priorities and will conduct an open review (all welcome!) in mid-April to introduce their proposed standards and to seek community feedback and suggested improvements. Their final standards will then be uploaded to the online standard dictionary. 

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# The first new CODATA - Research Data Canda - CASRAI INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH DATA MANAGEMENT GLOSSARY (IRiDiuM) had its WG kick-off meeting on January 10, 2017. 

Twenty experts from eight countries (Austria, Canada, India, Malta, Netherlands, South Africa, United Kingdom, and the United States of America; other national research-data partners are welcome!) are working on term definitions, building upon previous work done by Research Data Canada and CASRAI-CA in an online pilot glossary and 50 other references.

The IRiDiuM WG will review the 484 terms and definitions in the existing online pilot glossary. The WG will be revising a dozen or so of these, and plans to add approximately 90 new terms and definitions. The new IRiDiuM glossary is thus expected to contain approximately 577 terms and definitions.

The new open and standard glossary is meant to be a practical trans-disciplinary reference for individuals, organizations, and working groups concerned with the improvement of research data and data management, and as a meeting place for further discussion and development of terms. The aim is to create a stable and sustainably governed glossary of community accepted terms and definitions, and to keep it relevant by maintaining it as a ‘living document’ that is updated when necessary. The IRiDiuM Glossary will be publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution Only license (CC-BY).

# The CASRAI-UK OPEN ACCESS (OA) WG met for the first time on 17th January 2017.  The aim of the group is to produce a standard glossary of terms pertinent to OA to scholarly publications to aid clarity and to avoid confusion. The WG will deliver a draft glossary with a first set of terms & definitions for open review and comment by the wider community in April 2017, before publication in the CASRAI dictionary. Definitions will be clear and unambiguous, and where possible, fit with common usage. Definitions should be apposite across the OA activities of key stakeholders, including, but not limited to: researchers/authors; HEI research administration; libraries; scholarly publishers; research funders.

The work is not being undertaken in isolation. Existing definitions and uses of terms will be sourced to enable a holistic examination of context and uses. Such sources may include (but is not limited to) use by research groups and organizations including funding agencies, groups of OA experts and practitioners, publishers, organizations involved with existing standards, and support organizations such as Jisc.

The final output, a glossary of OA terms in the CASRAI dictionary, will be freely available for wide dissemination and adoption by the research performing community.

# The third new CASRAI UK ACADEMIC CAREER LEVELS TAXONOMY WG had its kick-off meeting on January 26th, 2017. The WG was established to work on a Standard Glossary and Taxonomy for Academic Career Levels. The CASRAI-UK community identified a lack of a standard taxonomy to classify researchers and scholars by the stage they are at in their career. The WG is aiming to develop between 6-8 taxonomy stages for academic career stages, focussing initially on those on a research-track. 

# CASRAI-UK IMPACTS WG will document how UK universities are currently collecting impact information in their various local software solutions, including commercial and in-house systems and spreadsheets. The WG will also document the various impact reporting information requirements of the UK funders, including REF2014 (the next REF likely to be reasonably similar) and the ResearchFish tool. Once this WG has the above landscape overview the next cycle of work will be to recommend how to move to standardise/harmonise the divergent information requirements.

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All new WGs will report monthly to the community on their progress and will then present their work in more detail to stakeholders from research institutions, funders, journals and software providers at the applicable national CASRAI Reconnect conference. Note that starting in 2017 the annual Reconnect conferences are moving from the Autumn to the late Spring each year to better accomodate the annual CASRAI standards development process. ReconnectCA17 will be held in Montreal, Canada in early June and ReconnectUK17 will be held in London, UK in late June (all dates coming soon).

Last but not least...

CASRAI Europe has their first kick-of meeting in Malta on April 24, 2017 to coincide with the annual conference of the European Association of Research Managers and Administrators (EARMA).