Guidance to FAIRification
During the three years of the EOSC-Nordic project, we have tracked the FAIR maturity of the Nordic and Baltic research data repositories and supported the repositories in FAIRification. As part of this work, we organized a series of webinars that provide step-by-step guidance on how to make your metadata more FAIR.
One of the key messages that we wish to convey is that FAIRification is entirely possible, and the time to start is now! Several repositories in our sample increased their FAIR scores, notably during the project’s timeframe. Another key message is that calculating FAIR scores or assessing FAIR maturity levels of repositories is not a straightforward task, and analysis of the scores needs to be done carefully. However, FAIR assessments are an excellent tool for improving repository practices. Repositories can and should do self-assessments to recognise where they have gaps. It is also worth noting that a digital object cannot really be made FAIR or evaluated for FAIRness in isolation from its context – in this case, the data repository. For example, the persistence of an identifier is determined by the commitment of the organisation assigning and managing it.
Follow the step-to-step guidance for FAIRification through our webinar series.
- STEP1 “Global Unique Identifiers for Datasets” (Nov 26, 2020) Event | Summary | Recordings
- STEP2 “FAIR principle F3 – Metadata includes the identifier of the data it describes” (Feb 3, 2021) Event | Summary |Recording and presentations
- STEP3 “Generic metadata standards” (Apr 29, 2021) Event | Summary | Recording and presentations
- STEP4 “Domain-specific metadata” (Oct 7, 2021) Event | Summary| Recording and presentations
- STEP5 “Value and Limitations of (FAIR) Automated Evaluators” (Feb 8, 2022) Event | Summary | Recording and presentations
Read more about the EOSC-Nordic’s FAIR evaluation journey from this article and our two deliverables: D4.1 An assessment of FAIR-uptake among regional digital repositories, and D4.3 Report on Nordic and Baltic repositories and their uptake of FAIR.