FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. Implementing the FAIR principles for data can be a challenge though. In this post I want to dive into how to do it in practice. |
The FAIR principles are at the core of many current initiatives in research and beyond. For example the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) consortia are working on making research data (and sometimes software) FAIR. There is even a special FAIR Data Spaces project. But what does FAIR mean for you? There is a collection of nice resources on FAIR data from the University of Mannheim, that I recommend to check out: https://github.com/UB-Mannheim/FAIR-Data-Week. In the following I will use these and my own experience to give you a bit of a guidance on how to get started. Generally for all FAIR principlesThe FAIR principles try to help you answer the most common questions people have about data. By the way, "data" in this context can mean many different things. Of course things like regular tabular data sets, but also images and other research materials. How to get startedStore your data somewhere that makes sense. If you can make your data openly available regular data platforms such as Zenodo will do. Of course also field specific or institutional platforms/repositories are good options. If you cannot make them openly available, you can usually still make the metadata available. Metadata is information about your data such as the author(s), how to cite it, what the data set contains, and so on. Making your data known in the community increases not only your chance of creating an impact with your work but also your work's FAIRness. You can do so by publishing a data paper or otherwise sharing more info with the community (social media, podcasts, conferences, ...). And then additionally... F for Findable(Three ingredients: data, metadata and infrastructure)
A for Accessible(FAIR is not the same as Open 👉 the point is to provide the exact conditions of accessibility)
I for Interoperable
R for Reusable
Need help?If you are a researcher and stuck on what to do, get started by thinking about how and if you can publish your data in a data repository. Libraries at research institutions are usually a good point of contact if you need support. In other news...I hope you enjoyed this post. All the best and happy weekend, Heidi P.S. If you're enjoying this newsletter, please consider supporting my work by leaving a tip.
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Heidi Seibold, MUCBOOK Clubhouse, Elsenheimerstr. 48, Munich, 81375 |
All things open and reproducible data science.
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