Do you remember the recommendations for “Turning FAIR into Reality” (TFiR)? In 2018 the European Commission expert group on FAIR data delivered an important report with an Action Plan and 27 recommendations, aiming at various stakeholders. FAIRsFAIR took the iniative to measure progress towards implementing these recommendations: where are we now with making research data FAIR?
At the LIBER 2020 Annual Conference, FAIRsFAIR and the LIBER Digital Skills for Library Staff & Researchers Working Group organised a workshop to discuss the role of academic and research libraries in assimilating the FAIR principles into higher education curricula. Lessons learned from the participants further enriched the findings from a recent FAIRsFAIR survey into the state of FAIR in this field - report by Claudia Engelhardt of FAIRsFAIR partner Göttingen State and University Library.
At the Open Repositories 2020 virtual conference in June, FAIRsFAIR offered an interactive workshop centred around the recently published report FAIRsFAIR's Transition Support Programme for Repositories. In this article, conference speaker Patricia Herterich of FAIRsFAIR partner organisation Digital Curation Centre documents her experience speaking to 215 attendees from around the world and highlights key recommendations from the report.
FAIRsFAIR took advantage of their presence at EOSC-hub Week 2020, surveying 66 currently active service providers, repository managers, data services managers, and users to discover their thoughts and opinions about the FAIR certification of repositories and other data services. This article, authored by Linas Cepinskas of FAIRsFAIR partner organisation DANS, summarises the findings from five strategic questions posed to participants in a session chaired by Hylke Koers (SURFsara), Ilona von Stein (DANS) and Sara Pittonet (TRUST-IT).
Formulating guidelines for data and infrastructure service providers is key to the realisation of an ecosystem in which findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) research data can be easily shared and optimally reused, driving down inefficiencies in the current academic system and enabling new forms of data-driven discovery. The article entitled "Recommendations for Services in a FAIR Data Ecosystem" and authored by representatives from FAIRsFAIR, FREYA, OpenAIRE, EOSC-hub, and RDA Europe, just published in the journal Patterns, puts forward key recommendations resulting from an extensive community consultation process which gathered and prioritised feedback on the challenges and priorities for services to support FAIR data.
The use of persistent identifiers across the data lifecycle emerged as a topic of key interest at the recent FAIRsFAIR webinar FAIRification of Services – Two Examples which highlighted two deliverables from FAIRsFAIR, one on the subject of sustainable support for semantic interoperability and the other concerning the development of FAIR-enabling practices. This article summarises and extends the discussion.
The challenge of helping repositories to expose their (meta) data in a more FAIR manner is not independent of making the metadata itself more interoperable. Two virtual sessions recently organised by FAIRsFAIR Work package 2 (FAIR Practices: Semantics, Interoperability, and Services) highlighted and further developed the findings from two reports which explore these twin issues.
Representatives from across the digital repository community have collaboratively developed the TRUST Principles, a set of guidelines to demonstrate trustworthiness in digital laboratories. The resulting paper, The TRUST Principles for digital repositories, has just been published in in the Nature Research journal Scientific Data.
Reacting to the COVID-19 emergency presents the scientific community with a unique opportunity to exploit the power of data across domains and several FAIRsFAIR partners are playing a strategic role. FAIRsFAIR supported repositories are also doing significant work. We surveyed them to understand how they were contributing to COVID-19 research, how such involvement would affect their activities in the short or long term, and how the support from FAIRsFAIR could benefit their activities.
While Europe discusses its data strategy, the digital transformation must be on the radar of universities. Digital skills, the infrastructure and support for “FAIR” research data management, and the European Open Science Cloud are crucial elements to foster more digital science, argues Lennart Stoy, Project Officer in the Research & Innovation Unit at EUA, FAIRsFAIR partner involved in the FAIR Data Science and Professionalisation project activities, in this blog post.