Group leaders
- The ORION-DBs website
- Interested in joining the working group? Sign up here:
ORION-DBs FORCE11 Working group sign-up form - First working group meeting:
Tuesday October 13 2026 4-6 pm CEST
Summary:
A growing set of actors are hosting large research information datasets in shared spaces, notably in Google BigQuery. This working group will act to coordinate amongst current contributors and work towards community standards for discovery, processing, preservation and documentation. It will also seek to build a community around future alternatives to proprietary cloud systems for data sharing at scale and identify future paths to community-led training and development resources.
Deliverables:
Our goal is to build a community with a focus on supporting the users of Open Research Information resources to make more sophisticated and complex use of these data sources. We will do this by consolidating and expanding the resources themselves through supporting providers, gathering user stories and developing training materials. Finally we will scope pathways to technological independence from proprietary systems consistent with the needs of users.
- Validated documentation for processing, hosting and delivering Open Research Information resources via BigQuery in the ORION DBs system
- An expanded set of tools for processing, managing, distributing and archiving large-scale open research information resources
- An expanded set of host providers (from the four at launch) providing access to an expanded set of ORI resources via BigQuery in the first instance
- A set of identified use cases/user stories for the ORION DBs resources
- Training materials including template queries and tutorials to support common use cases and user needs
- An assessment report on technology, governance and management options for alternative technology platforms to deliver equivalent or improved functionality for ORION DBs use cases, including resource requirements and risk assessment
Activities
Public webinar
We held a public webinar on Friday, September 4 2026 as part of the CWTS Research Seminars.
The webinar introduced the ORION-DB initiative and the FORCE11 Working Group. If you want to learn more about ORION_DB and the planned activities of the working group, you can view the webinar recording.
Working group meetings
Starting in October 2026, we will organize quarterly (= 3-monthly) working group meetings, which will be held online. Working group meetings will both be an opportunity to share updates with the full working group, and for participants to split up in subgroups (see below) to work on specific outcomes. with asynchronous work planned between working group meetings.
The first working group meeting will be held on Tuesday, Oct 13 from 4-6 pm CEST.
Working group organization
We envision the working group to carry out work in 3 subgroups, each consisting of specific stakeholders:
- Providers – discuss shared approaches to data processing and hosting
- Users – collect use cases, formulate requirements (including for access, training materials, data sources and alternative infrastructure), organize peer-to-peer support
- Infrastructure developers – share and discuss approaches for alternative infrastructure,
Sign up for the working group
If you are a data provider, metadata user or infrastructure developer interested to participate in the working group, please sign up here. We will send you an invitation for the first working group meeting in October 2026 and keep you informed on working group developments.
