Greetings colleagues!

Welcome to the December 2020 Module 1 Newsletter.

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This has been a difficult year, but I have been humbled by the can-do spirit I've seen in our CoP and across CGIAR. A very big thank you - for your energy and professionalism under challenging circumstances, often while juggling family needs and work commitments. Although 2021 promises to be a bit unsettled as One CGIAR takes shape, I believe it will allow us to seize new opportunities. The year is likely to bring stronger support for the good work you do, in the form of a new Open and FAIR data policy (that I am still hoping to be able to share again soon, once I get the go-ahead from the System Office), and a new CGIAR digital strategy. I look forward to a more stable, peaceful, and saner 2021 for all, when we are once again able to be near those we care about while all staying healthy - and to have a better work-life balance.

Best wishes for a happy holiday season and/or relaxing break,
Medha and Michelle

• Understanding gaps in identifying gender research to further improve findability of CGIAR resources via discussions with the CGIAR Gender Platform. This has made clear the need for a list of controlled vocabularies or concepts that could help better describe gender outputs, and capacity building to help researchers understand the value of enhanced metadata. In the coming year, we hope to finalize this work with the CGIAR Gender Platform.
• Sharing experience on the CG Core Metadata Schema implementation across CGIAR repositories a focused discussion on usage of web services that CG Core recommends. In 2021 we will continue building capacity related to the implementation of CG Core in collaboration with the Repository WG and beyond CGIAR. 

• The RWG is collecting terms that CGIAR centers use to define the metadata field “kind of data.” The group will work with the MWG to arrive at controlled list for defining this field.
• The group’s lead, Nilam Prasai submitted an abstract “Toward Fair and Open Data: CGIAR Centers’ Data Repositories”, which was accepted for presentation at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Dec 1-17.

• During the Big Data 2020 Convention, colleagues of the OWG presented the progress of the sub-groups they lead and discussed plans for 2021. Videos of the sessions are available here, along with session summary.
• Members worked collaboratively with partners within and beyond CGIAR on a number of ontology development and enhancement efforts. These included: Ontology for small fisheries and aquaculture, developing connections between SEONT and OIMS, the Agronomy Ontology, and the Crop Ontology. The latter also included work on a new prototype website using NEO4J as the backend for the graph database to enable dynamic visualization of ontologies and semantic relationships.
• The OWG meetings also included presentations for knowledge sharing and cross-learning, including one focused on integrating IITA’s Cassavabase and CKAN. Data files extracted from the breedbases and available in CKAN are already annotated with Crop Ontology term IDs and the OWG will prospect how they might be extracted to populate keyword fields in the CG Core.

• The Open Access Working Group worked together to develop educational material for use at centers, on topics such as predatory publishing. Part or all of such materials can be used as handouts, web content, or in another form. Other guides to developments in publishing in general, picking Creative Commons licenses, and reporting on ISI journal status were also created.
• In 2021, the OAWG will engage with Open Access communities beyond CGIAR to understand how similar institutions cope with challenges in Scholarly Publishing. The group is also working to document the CGIAR experience with open access, comparing citation rates between OA and restricted articles and augmenting this with researcher interviews to capture how OA is used, and what is most valuable for both research staff and the audience we serve.

IDM CoP webinar series - stay tuned!

Past webinars

Useful resources