FAIRness Literacy: The Achilles’ Heel of Applying FAIR Principles (original) (raw)
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From Conceptualization to Implementation: FAIR Assessment of Research Data Objects
Data Science Journal
Funders and policy makers have strongly recommended the uptake of the FAIR principles in scientific data management. Several initiatives are working on the implementation of the principles and standardized applications to systematically evaluate data FAIRness. This paper presents practical solutions, namely metrics and tools, developed by the FAIRsFAIR project to pilot the FAIR assessment of research data objects in trustworthy data repositories. The metrics are mainly built on the indicators developed by the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group. The tools' design and evaluation followed an iterative process. We present two applications of the metrics: an awareness-raising self-assessment tool and an automated FAIR data assessment tool. Initial results of testing the tools with researchers and data repositories are discussed, and future improvements suggested including the next steps to enable FAIR data assessment in the broader research data ecosystem.
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - KMIS, 2022
Digitization in the research domain refers to the increasing integration and analysis of research information in the process of research data management. However, it is not clear whether it is used and, more importantly, whether the data are of sufficient quality, and value and knowledge could be extracted from them. FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) represent a promising asset to achieve this. Since their publication, they have rapidly proliferated and have become part of (inter-)national research funding programs. A special feature of the FAIR principles is the emphasis on the legibility, readability, and understandability of data. At the same time, they pose a prerequisite for data for their reliability, trustworthiness, and quality. In this sense, the importance of applying FAIR principles to research information and respective systems such as Current Research Information Systems (CRIS), which is an underrepresented subject for research, is the subject of the paper. Supporting the call for the need for a ”one-stop-shop and register-onceuse-many approach”, we argue that CRIS is a key component of the research infrastructure landscape, directly targeted and enabled by operational application and the promotion of FAIR principles. We hypothesize that the improvement of FAIRness is a bidirectional process, where CRIS promotes FAIRness of data and infrastructures, and FAIR principles push further improvements to the underlying CRIS.
2020
This report is a milestone of the FAIRsFAIR project. It includes two main results on FAIR assessment at the dataset level: The FAIRsFAIR Data Object Assessment Metrics (v0.3) specification contains 15 metrics proposed by FAIRsFAIR to evaluate the FAIRness of research data objects in Trustworthy Digital Repositories (TDRs). We improved the metrics based on a focus group's feedback and the RDA-endorsed FAIR data maturity model guidelines and specification. A total of 33 FAIR stakeholders, such as research communities, data service providers, standard bodies, and coordination fora participated in the focus group. A preprint of the journal article titled ‘From Conceptualization to Implementation: FAIR Assessment of Research Data Objects’, submitted to CODATA Data Science Journal Special collection on RDA. The article summarizes the metrics development, and its two applications: an awareness-raising self-assessment tool, and a tool for automated assessment of research data FAIRness. ...
Data Intelligence, 2019
A growing number of research funding organizations (RFOs) are taking responsibility to increase the scientific and social impact of research output. Also reusable research data are recognized as relevant output for gaining impact. RFOs are therefore promoting FAIR research data management and stewardship (RDM) in their research funding cycle. However, the implementation of FAIR RDM still faces important obstacles and challenges. To solve these, stakeholders work together to develop innovative tools and practices. Here we elaborate on the role of RFOs in developing a FAIR funding model to support the FAIR RDM in the funding cycle, integrated with research community specific guidance, criteria and metadata, and enabling automatic assessments of progress and output from RDM. The model facilitates to create research data with a high level of FAIRness that are meaningful for a research community. To fully benefit from the model, RFOs, research institutions and service providers need to i...
D3.2 FAIR Data Practice Analysis
2019
This document provides an analysis of practices to support FAIR data production within a broad selection of research disciplines and research data repositories. It aims to inform the priorities of stakeholders interested in embedding those practices in research communities. Those stakeholders include policy makers, data librarians and others providing data services to research communities, as well as champions of FAIR principles in those communities. It also identifies priority themes for initial work in FAIRsFAIR to support ESFRI cluster and EOSC projects in FAIR culture change. These include developing a self-assessment framework for research infrastructures and institutions on their progress to support FAIR enabling practices in the communities they serve. This will underpin further work to build capabilities, describe good practice and address the highly uneven awareness of FAIR principles and the lack of information on research community implementation.
Community-driven governance of FAIRness assessment: an open issue, an open discussion
Open Research Europe
Although FAIR Research Data Principles are targeted at and implemented by different communities, research disciplines, and research stakeholders (data stewards, curators, etc.), there is no conclusive way to determine the level of FAIRness intended or required to make research artefacts (including, but not limited to, research data) Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The FAIR Principles cover all types of digital objects, metadata, and infrastructures. However, they focus their narrative on data features that support their reusability. FAIR defines principles, not standards, and therefore they do not propose a mechanism to achieve the behaviours they describe in an attempt to be technology/implementation neutral. A range of FAIR assessment metrics and tools have been designed that measure FAIRness. Unfortunately, the same digital objects assessed by different tools often exhibit widely different outcomes because of these independent interpretations of FAIR. This resu...
D3.4 Recommendations on practice to support FAIR data principles
2020
Building upon an analysis of the research data practice landscape in 2019, FAIRsFAIR has prepared a series of recommendations for practical actions to support the realisation of a FAIR ecosystem. These recommendations will be used to inform the development of guidance resources to support further adoption of FAIR data standards and practices by research communities. They are released as a living document that will be refined to reflect the forthcoming work in FAIRsFAIR, other projects funded under the INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019 call, and other relevant initiatives.
2019
There is a growing acknowledgement in the scientific community of the importance of making experimental data machine findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Recognizing that high quality metadata are essential to make datasets FAIR, members of the GO FAIR Initiative and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) have initiated a series of workshops to encourage the creation of Metadata for Machines (M4M), enabling any self-identified stakeholder to define and promote the reuse of standardized, comprehensive machine-actionable metadata. The funders of scientific research recognize that they have an important role to play in ensuring that experimental results are FAIR, and that high quality metadata and careful planning for FAIR data stewardship are central to these goals. We describe the outcome of a recent M4M workshop that has led to a pilot programme involving two national science funders, the Health Research Board of Ireland (HRB) and the Netherlands Organisation for Heal...
There is a growing acknowledgement in the scientific community of the importance of making experimental data machine findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). Recognizing that high quality metadata are essential to make datasets FAIR, members of the GO FAIR Initiative and the Research Data Alliance (RDA) have initiated a series of workshops to encourage the creation of Metadata for Machines (M4M), enabling any self-identified stakeholder to define and promote the reuse of standardized, comprehensive machine-actionable metadata. The funders of scientific research recognize that they have an important role to play in ensuring that experimental results are FAIR, and that high quality metadata and careful planning for FAIR data stewardship are central to these goals. We describe the outcome of a recent M4M workshop that has led to a pilot programme involving two national science funders, the Health Research Board of Ireland (HRB) and the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development (ZonMW). These funding organizations will explore new technologies to define at the time that a request for proposals is issued the minimal set of machine-actionable metadata that they would like investigators to use to annotate their datasets, to enable investigators to create such metadata to help make their data FAIR, and to develop data-stewardship plans that ensure that experimental data will be managed appropriately abiding by the FAIR principles. The FAIR Funders design envisions a data-management workflow having seven essential stages, where solution providers are openly invited to participate. The initial pilot programme will launch using existing computer-based tools of those who attended the M4M Workshop.
Supporting FAIR data: categorization of research data as a tool in data management
Informaatiotutkimus
The demand for implementation of the FAIR data principles is in many cases difficult for a researcher to adhere to in efficient ways due to lacking tools. We suggest categorizing data in a more extensive and systematic way with focus on the inherent properties of the data as means to enhancing research data services. After discussing different approaches to categorizing data, we propose a tripartite research data categorization based around the inherent aspect of stability. The three research data types are operational data, generic research data and research data publications. Generic research data is validated data and can be cumulative, i.e. data can be added without versioning, however if it is dynamic it should be versioned. Generic research data should be separated from immutable dataset publications that are published for reasons of reproducibility of specific research results.