Under the auspices of RDA Europe and EOSC Future, FAIRsharing has now officially launched our new Community Curation Programme. This Programme creates a collaborative environment where domain experts are selected to oversee certain areas within the FAIRsharing registry in return for a number of professional benefits. Our community curators promote the standards and databases most relevant to their research domain or area of focus, as well as promoting their own research community and ensuring that the resources within that community are findable, accessible, and exposed to data management tools, knowledge graphs and other research software. FAIRsharing Community Curators help us help their communities to be more accurately and comprehensively represented with us.
Our user community is diverse in breadth and scope, with a number of stakeholder groups across all areas of research and research support. In early 2022, this programme began with a few Early Adopters (see our recent spotlight by Lindsey Anderson), who have contributed greatly to the initial success of the programme, and we now have our first full intake of community curators. Our full list of community curators shows the breadth and diversity of research areas within the programme. This blog post provides a little more detail about our 2022 Intake.
Where our curators come from
Many of our curators are part of EOSC, with representation from EOSC-Life, SSHOC and ESCAPE. Within the RDA, our new curators are collectively engaged with over 20 Working Groups or Interest Groups. We have representatives from all research domains.
We are also highly international, which fits FAIRsharing’s role as a project that is both cross-disciplinary and globally applicable. Our 2022 curators come from over 20 countries in Asia, Europe, North America and South America.
What our curators wish to achieve
We asked our curators what they hope to get out of this programme, and they had a lot of interesting things to say. Nearly all of them wished to add new and enrich existing standards, databases and policies in their discipline to FAIRsharing. Nearly as popular was the fact that this programme will allow them to network with a community of like-minded people and to gain attribution for their knowledge and expertise in curation processes. Finally, FAIRsharing’s rich relationships appealed to about 2/3 of our intake, who wish to use the programme to learn about the complexity and relationships within the landscape of resources relevant to them.
A couple of our curators provided more information about what drew them to apply.
I am interested in participating in this program because I wish to expand my knowledge on the subject and to learn about curation from other subject areas (other than Social Sciences and Humanities, in which I am active).
Maja Dolinar
I find myself dedicating more and more time on curating […] In doing so, I experienced how much standards are key, but also that [these] curation skills and activities are indeed valuable activities that make a difference in increasing discoverability and reusability of resources we want to share.
Geneviève Michaud
Details on the programme and future calls for applications are available on our community curation documentation.
