This post was co-published as a TIER2 news item, and was written by representatives from OpenAIRE, FAIRsharing and other collaborators within the TIER2 project.
About
OpenAIRE and FAIRsharing have extended their collaboration in the context of the TIER2 project with the integration of FAIRsharing content, focussing on policy and standards records, within the ARGOS DMP platform.
| ARGOS is the OpenAIRE service for DMPs. It is based on the open source OpenDMP software and is accessible from the OpenAIRE catalogue and the EOSC portal. ARGOS assumes the role of an active DMP platform that goes beyond providing researchers with structured forms and instructions to write their DMPs. It enables researchers to actively prepare and manage their DMPs by connecting to other scientific workflows and services, e.g. data repositories, ethics departments, publications, notebooks, scientific registries, SKGs. ARGOS enables FAIRification of produced DMPs by, among other things, assigning DOIs and licences to each output and applying semantics to support the creation of qualified references. FAIRsharing is a curated, informative and educational resource on metadata standards for digital objects (checklists, models/formats, terminologies, identifier schemas), inter-related to databases (repositories and knowledge basis) and data policies, across all disciplines. It guides consumers to discover, select and use these resources with confidence, producers to make their resource more discoverable, more widely adopted and cited, and powers third party tools by providing trustworthy content to promote standards and databases. RDM practitioners and DMP tool developers form a core part of the FAIRsharing community, as they need to be able to provide unambiguous references to standards, databases, and policies. |
Towards Reproducibility Management Plans (RMPs)
The activities of TIER2 project are centred around reproducibility to understand the theoretical and technical aspects pertaining to the subject and produce outputs that enhance its adoption by the epistemic community. To achieve that, the project employs the concept of pilots targeting different stakeholders and contexts. OpenAIRE is responsible for producing a prototype “Reproducibility Management Plan” that will be onboarded to ARGOS and serve as an enhanced version of the EC and Science Europe examples, with tailored questions, input and instructions for reproducibility. First steps towards the RMP involve better coverage of current resources provided by ARGOS. The presented integration supports this effort by enriching it with information on data policy and standards.
Implementation stage
APIs come in different protocols and architectures which need specific configurations to be in place by service providers that want to consume their information/content. OpenDMP is a generic, highly configurable, DMP tool. All external APIs used for referencing entities (Researchers, Organizations, Datasets, Licences, Policies, Standards etc) can be dynamically configured at the installation level, using detailed configurations on how these APIs will be called, with what criteria, and how the responses will be parsed, presented, and stored.
ARGOS was initially designed for consuming public/open APIs. Since FAIRsharing offers protected/authenticated APIs, we designed and implemented an extension to the External Reference Configuration mechanism of OpenDMP software in order to support authentication and request chaining. This includes configuration options regarding the order of requests, the authentication service configuration (url, client information, scopes, etc), the type of authentication, the authentication parameters, and also a declarative way on how this authentication information will be used to the data retrieval requests (headers, cookies, etc).
How it works
Administrators creating their DMP templates in ARGOS and other OpenDMP software instances will now be able to configure the FAIRsharing API, and in turn researchers using these templates will be able to search and select information from FAIRsharing without leaving the DMP platform and thus, disturbing their work. Searching is embedded in the template and happens automatically following keywords that researchers type. That way they provide a clear point of reference to policies and standards used in the context of their research.
Why it is important
The configuration of the FAIRsharing API in ARGOS allows the creation of DMPs that include FAIRsharing record DOIs, which provide explicit, unambiguous identification of the databases (that have already imported in the OpenAIRE Research Graph), standards, and policies that DMP authors want to recommend. Without clear links to these resources, implementers of the DMPs may be left unsure as to exactly which resource they should be using.
The ARGOS community acts as DMP liaisons in the RDM chain to ensure that DMP specifications are understood and fulfilled by everyone along the way. FAIRsharing supports this mission by helping the ARGOS community both discover the resources they need as well as improve the discoverability of their own databases, standards and data policies through their registration.
Useful resources
FAIRsharing API documentation: https://fairsharing.org/API_doc.
FAIRsharing metadata format: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6875036.
FAIRsharing Educational Resources: https://fairsharing.org/educational
ARGOS code repository: https://code-repo.d4science.org/MaDgiK-CITE/argos.
ARGOS / OpenDMP public API: https://argos.openaire.eu/srv/swagger-ui/.
