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FAIR Awareness: Hands-on workshop in Vienna

Conclusion of the two-day event: It's a long way, but with many prospects.

Two trainers (man and woman) smiling into the camera

© Barbara Sánchez

Two who really want to tackle FAIR: Barbara Magagna (GO FAIR Foundation) and Erik Van Winkle (DeSci Labs)

From 25-26 May 2023, trainers and fellows of the GO FAIR Foundation (GFF) held a two-day workshop, with the aim to increase the awareness of the FAIR Guiding Principles that help to automate the Findabiltiy, Accessibility, Interoperation and Reuse of data and digital services. The workshop provided historical and technical context to help participants better appreciate the value of FAIR and how FAIR might impact their own work in an academic environment. They also explored the key issues around the implementation of FAIR, considering technology trends in FAIRification and the FAIR Orchestration of research data.

Conclusions

25 trainees participated on-site, another 15-20 joined online. They represented a mix of data stewards, computer scientists, research support staff and researchers from ten countries. The different points of view and expertise led to interesting conversations that deserve to be pursued further. One repeating discussion was how the technical dimension of FAIR can be conveyed to researchers. The FAIR aspects presented revolved a lot around semantic artefacts and challenges on domain level. Ideally, researchers should be motivated to apply the FAIR principles throughout their research activities. However, this requires that a range of methods, services and implementation guidelines supporting such activities be readily available. Because these are often not in place, it is important to encourage data stewards and semantic experts of the research communities to attend these workshops.

While at the beginning of the workshop, via a Menti survey, most of the participants described themselves as FAIR experts, when the question was asked again at the end, the answers were much more reserved, realizing that FAIR known from funders’ requirements and as generally perceived do in fact only scratch on the surface.

The GO FAIR offices, opens an external URL in a new window – two of these, the Denmark office, opens an external URL in a new window and the Austria office, opens an external URL in a new window (organizing team) were present in the Vienna workshop – will have an important role in bridging the communication across stakeholder groups. The developments are also driven by initiatives like the GFF, which offers a Training Programme, opens an external URL in a new window and a dedicated Fellows Programme, opens an external URL in a new window for individuals interested to get involved in ongoing developments. If you are interested to learn more, please contact Barbara Magagna at barbara@gofair.foundation.

Materials of the workshop

The presentations given by the GFF trainers Barbara Magagna and Erik Schultes, and by the GFF fellows Juliana Menger and Erik Van Winkle are deposited on the OSF platform https://osf.io/e8xdt/, opens an external URL in a new window.

Useful references

Core tech for FIP (FAIR Implementation Profiles) workshops are the FIP Wizard, opens an external URL in a new window and nanopublications, opens an external URL in a new window which are used to describe FAIR Enabling Resources in a machine-readable manner.

Core tech for M4M workshops are BioPortal, opens an external URL in a new window (vocabs) and CEDAR, opens an external URL in a new window (metadata schema): CEDAR forms use Bioportal vocabularies to build drop-downs and autocompletes.

Technology for vocabs

Technology for metadata

Tools for FAIR Orchestration

Contact

GO FAIR Austria office: https://www.go-fair.org/go-fair-initiative/go-fair-offices/go-fair-austria-office/, opens an external URL in a new window and https://fair-office.at/?lang=en, opens an external URL in a new window

TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
Favoritenstraße 16 (top floor), 1040 Vienna

research.data@tuwien.ac.at

Twitter: @RDMTUWien