Participants prioritizing areas for action!

Group	Priority	Action
Libraries	Consider FAIR compliance and data sharing as part of research assessment, among other criteria	Infrastructures should be evaluated and rewarded to be FAIR by e.g. incentives and increasing visibility as a rewarding system to researchers who apply the FAIR principles to their research
Service providers	Domain-specific ontologies, as domain-specific requirements have to be taken into account	Identify disciplines which don't have ontologies and create awareness for the Bartoc registry and enrich it.
Research institutions	Create practical guidelines on how to enable FAIR in repositories	Identify and present cost of developing supporting infrastructure including human resources

 

 

The selected priorities and subsequent actions discussed by the breakout groups formed the basis for a discussion on which stakeholders could take on the responsibilities in the services ecosystem for FAIR data for the various actions. To gather input from the audience on the identified actions, we used the interactive presentation tool Mentimeter. See the picture below for an example of feedback on one of the actions. The example states an action formulated by the "libraries" group (see table above) and input from the audience on who should be responsible for executing the action.

 

Panel discussion on actions

The audience participation part of the workshop was followed by a panel discussion, during which the panellists shared their personal views on the prioritised recommendations and actions. The panel consisted of five experts of diverse backgrounds relevant to FAIR data:

• Ian Duncan (Australian Research Data Commons),
• Françoise Genova (Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg; EOSC FAIR WG),
• Odile Hologne (French Institute for Agricultural Research; EOSC Rules of Participation WG; FAIRsFAIR Champion),
• Rachael Kotarski (The British Library; EOSC FAIR WG; the FREYA project)
• Tobias Weigel (DKRZ; EOSC Architecture WG; FAIRsFAIR champion)

The panel observed that the selected actions of the prioritizing exercise sometimes resembled other recommendations. The connection between different recommendations may not come as a surprise and signals that the intertwined ecosystem of services can make FAIR a reality by collaboration and solutions might have positive outcomes on other issues in the FAIR data research cycle.

 

The discussion in the final part of the session focused on responsibilities and roles of different stakeholders. User requirements were put forward as strong incentives, as was the professionalization of data management and the role of data stewardship herein. Often neglected in discussions, national libraries should and can be more involved in discussions and events around FAIR.

Another critical point was the opportunity and responsibility of services to simplify the process of making data FAIR. It was concluded that making data FAIR is not the sole responsibility of the researcher but should be a common effort of research institutions, funders, service providers and experts.

The results of the breakout groups and panel, in combination with the conclusion of the previous workshops, will be used as input to finalize a report with recommendations on services to support FAIR data. The final version of the report is intended for submission to the EOSC Working Group on FAIR.