Data-driven research is expanding in academic research, and the importance of research data is increasing. At the same time, globalization of academic research and collaborative research across organizations are progressing. Therefore, there is an increasing need for data aggregation and management technologies that enable multiple researchers who are geographically separated from each other to share and manage data, easily handle a wide variety of large-scale and large-volume data, and carry out academic research.
In addition, reproducibility of academic research is becoming increasingly important from the perspective of preventing research misconduct and improving the reliability of research results. Universities and research institutes in Japan and abroad are now in the process of formulating guidelines that set standards for the retention period and management methods of research data created and acquired in the course of research activities, with the aim of promoting fair research activities. An increasing number of academic societies also cite reproducibility as one indicator for the adoption of papers.
In response to these trends, the National Institute of Informatics (NII) has developed the research data management platform "GakuNin RDM" and the data publication platform "WEKO3" and has started providing these services to the entire university in Japan. While progress has been made in providing infrastructures that promote the sharing and publication of research data, efforts to address reproducibility and collaboration with computer centers, which generate and utilize a large amount of research data, are still insufficient.
Our research group promotes the research and development of data aggregation and management technology to enhance the reproducibility of research data generated at computer centers and to promote data-driven research using research data accumulated at computer centers and the computer resources owned by computer centers.