The RDA FAIRsharing WG continues to collaborate with a number of other Research Data Alliance (RDA) working groups. Here we provide you with a summary of what we’ve been doing since the last plenary as well as what we’re involved with as we approach the next plenary, RDA23, in Costa Rica 12-14 November.
RDA23 in Costa Rica
This year, co-chairs Susanna Sansone and Allyson Lister will attend the RDA23 in person and remotely (respectively). Lindsey Anderson (FAIRsharing Community Champion) will also be attending in person. This is a great opportunity to find us and talk to us about how we can help each other enable FAIR and good research data management. Let us know if you’d like to set aside some time to chat!
Susanna will also be presenting a poster titled FAIRsharing Educational: Supporting RDM best practices and enabling FAIR. We’ve included the abstract text here to give you an idea of what the poster will cover.
Across all disciplines, there are thousands of repositories (databases and knowledge bases), as well as community-developed standards for (the identification, citation and reporting of) digital objects such as datasets, software, materials. Making the right choice is challenging, but understanding this evolving landscape is essential: standards and repositories are pillars of the FAIR Principles.
FAIRsharing (https://fairsharing.org/) is a curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases 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 — as well as RDM tool developers — form a core part of our community, and this poster will provide information about how this community can access and use the FAIRsharing Educational provision for training and support.
We recommend that you explore all of the FAIRsharing Educational (https://fairsharing.org/educational) series, created by the FAIRsharing Team and Community Champions (https://fairsharing.org/community_champions). This Champions programme, launched under the auspices of the RDA as part of an RDA / EOSC Future Domain Ambassadorship, 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.
Data Repository Attributes
The Data Repository Attributes WG recently completed, with its members and co-chairs (of which Allyson is one) presenting their final outputs in May.
Of particular importance is the set of 17 common descriptive attributes for research data repositories (https://doi.org/10.15497/RDA00103). These attributes represent a minimal set of information about research data repositories, and are intended to help repositories describe themselves in a way that allows the research community to make informed opinions about them. FAIRsharing has already implemented all of these attributes, which means that you can discover the RDA-endorsed attributes of repositories by querying FAIRsharing’s database registry either through our user interface or programmatically.
Trustworthy Technical Repositories
The FAIRsharing WG continues to collaborate with a number of new and existing working groups. Allyson has joined the Community-based catalogue of requirements for Trustworthy Technical Repository Service Providers (TRSP) WG as a co-chair. This WG will focus on how to extend the umbrella of trust, as exemplified by formal certification authorities such as ISO and CoreTrustSeal, to a wider group. The working group will publish a set of modular trustworthiness performance expectations for data repositories and related services to help with the creation of decentralised certification schemes.
Multi-Omics Standards Integration
The Multi-Omics Metadata Standards Integration (MOMSI) WG is currently performing a landscape review and collection of existing Omics community standards, which will be represented in a multi-omics metadata schema standards and reporting matrix plus associated FAIRsharing collection. Lindsey Anderson, a FAIRsharing Community Champion from PNNL, is a co-chair of this working group.
Machine Actionable DMPs
This year also saw greater integration of FAIRsharing content into DMP tools and machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMP). We have extended our collaboration with the Data Stewardship Wizard team and will continue to engage with and monitor DMP-related developments in the RDA via groups such as the Active DMP IG.
