In this guest blog, FAIRsharing Community Champion for Policies and Chemistry Kay Burrows writes about her recent policy curation as she finishes her short-term contract with FAIRsharing, and her plans as she continues in the role of Champion.
I became a FAIRsharing Community Champion in 2022 for Policy and Chemistry and joined the team on a short-term contract in February 2024 to enrich the FAIRsharing policy registry. My goal was to improve existing policy curation and add new policies, providing a richer overview of the policy landscape through the curation of a number of community-driven metadata fields.
The policy registry consists of a series of records capturing the data preservation, management, and sharing policies from funding bodies, journal publishers, institutions, projects and societies. My first task was to complete the curation of the existing policy registry begun by all of the Champions and FAIRsharing staff. This involved checking record accuracy and making changes where new policies have come into place, updating the metadata fields, and linking between FAIRsharing records where policies recommend databases and standards, or extend other policies..
It is important for policy makers to present a set of clear, comprehensive and transparent policy guidelines which are easy to find and navigate so that users can find the information they need to comply with the policy easily.
Kay Burrows
We then created 70 new journal policy records to provide an overview of different data policies from many of the major publishers, and I curated these records individually to ensure the consistency of the record metadata fields. In total, I have updated 146 records and made 1339 distinct edits during this contract.
I have learned a lot during my time with FAIRsharing and I hope to take that important knowledge forward to my work in publishing. Here are three of my key reflections:
– It is important for policy makers to present a set of clear, comprehensive and transparent policy guidelines which are easy to find and navigate so that users can find the information they need to comply with the policy easily.
– I found the relationships between policies particularly interesting. FAIRsharing is a great resource to help researchers easily find recommended databases, standards and other policies that are important to their community.
– I’m really proud to have worked with FAIRsharing and have contributed to the policy registry. I’ll continue to be a part of the Community Champion programme going forwards and I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes next for FAIRsharing.
