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Building Global Connections for Research Commons: CRDCN’s impact at the Lorentz workshop
Posted on: September 16, 2025
Last month, 25 international researchers and data experts gathered at the Lorentz Centre in Leiden, Netherlands, to explore how to better provide support for the implementation and scaling of Research Commons nationally and worldwide, using shared language, frameworks, and real-world models. Titled “Making the Global Open Research Commons Truly Global” and organized by the Global Open Research Commons (GORC) Interest and Working Groups of the Research Data Alliance, the workshop aimed to expand the discussion outside of existing implementations and refine the model for wider adoption.
What is the Research Data Alliance?
The Research Data Alliance (RDA) was launched as a community-driven initiative in 2013 with the vision that researchers and innovators can openly share and re-use data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society.
The RDA’s mission is to build the social and technical bridges that enable that vision, accomplished through the creation, adoption and use of the social, organizational, and technical infrastructure needed to reduce barriers to data sharing and exchange. Scientists & researchers join forces with technical experts in focused Working Groups, exploratory Interest Groups and Communities of Practice. Individual membership is free and open to all.
CRDCN’s Executive Director, Natalie Harrower, participated in the Lorentz workshop, in particular contributing insights from the perspective of research infrastructures that support the use of sensitive or restricted data.
“The goal of the Global Open Research Commons group is to collectively create, disseminate, and maintain a model that provides a common language and typology for describing research commons, in order to enable different commons’ to work together, and to assist the development of best practices in organizational design and function. Participating in the RDA working group and the concentrated Lorentz workshop on this topic is part of a wider effort to highlight the work of the CRDCN to international peers, and to create relationships for the exchange of ideas. As the main national research infrastructure supporting quantitative social sciences in Canada, it’s important to stay abreast of international developments and to contribute to their shaping.” said Dr. Harrower. “Engagement with the larger research ecosystem, both national and international, is a key part of our current strategic plan” (See: EN https://doi.org/10.71548/v8np-3h63 | FR https://doi.org/10.71548/ceb9-2123 )
Workshop participants considered a variety of existing profiles of organizations that have adopted the model (e.g. SURF in the Netherlands and CSC in Finland), built new adoption profiles to test its resilience, and considered the goals and assumptions behind the concepts of “openness” and “the commons”. The diversity of commons, which include many large- and small-scale research infrastructures, was key to testing definitional boundaries.
What is the Lorentz Centre?
The Lorentz Centre is workshop center that hosts international scientific meetings, and is funded by the University of Leiden and the Dutch research council (NWO). In research data and open science communities, it is perhaps best known for catalyzing the development of the FAIR principles at a workshop in 2014.
Participants from the GORC Lortentz workshop are currently finalising a paper that highlights the outcome of the workshop, which will appear on the CRDCN website.
Helpful Links:
- A plain language guide to the model: Payne, K., Corrie, B., Crawley, F., Harrower, N., Macneil, R., Maxwell, L., Sansone, S.-A., Treloar, A., Woodford, C., Åkerström, W. N., & RDA GORC International Model WG. (2023). The Global Open Research Commons International Model Report, Version 1 (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00097
- Current GORC working group at the Research Data Alliance: https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups/gorc-international-implementations-working-group-gorc-ii-wg/activity/
- Information on how to join the Research Data Alliance: https://www.rd-alliance.org/membership/individual-membership/
- Information on the Lorentz Centre: https://www.lorentzcenter.nl/site/index.php?pntHandler=WorkshopTemplatePage&pntType=ConPagina&id=2143