Abstract
The FAIR Data Principles propose that all scholarly output should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. As a set of guiding principles, expressing only the kinds of behaviours that researchers should expect from contemporary data resources, how the FAIR principles should manifest in reality was largely open to interpretation. As support for the Principles has spread, so has the breadth of these interpretations. In observing this creeping spread of interpretation, several of the original authors felt it was now appropriate to revisit the Principles, to clarify both what FAIRness is, and is not.
The Principles have also resonated in many discussions beyond their original scope of research data sharing, in domains as diverse as Archaeology [22], and environmental monitors for “smart cities” [12]. This wide embrace of the FAIR Principles by governments, governing bodies, and funding bodies, has led to a growing number of data resources attempting to demonstrate their FAIRness, for an example, see ‘Being FAIR at UniProt’ [10]. The UniProt example is spot-on, but there are also emerging indications that the original meanings of findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable sometimes may be stretched; even, in some cases, in order to avoid change or improvement. In other cases, the proposed implementation of these principles, with the goal of an Internet of FAIR Data and Services, is beginning to raise concern and confusion. Therefore, with the broader community now forming independent, thoughtful opinions about the meaning and consequences of the FAIR Principles, it seems worthwhile to clarify their original intent and interpretation.
2.Becoming cloudy Achieving the transition from the current closed and silo-based approaches to research towards more open and networked scholarship needs important changes in the science reward and methodological practice. But it also needs an increased support infrastructure of FAIR data-publishing, analytics, computational capacity, virtual machines and workflow systems. These infrastructure needs have been – and are being – addressed intensively at the European Commission level, especially in the context of the 2016 Dutch EC Presidency [16] and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) [5], the e-IRG roadmap [16] and in the US through the NIH Data Commons projects. In Australia, ANDS [2] and AARnet [1] follow a very similar approach and recently, the East African Community has adopted the Dakar declaration on Open Science in Africa [23]. In South Africa, the
African Data Intensive Research Cloud [21] is part of the roadmap for research infrastructures as well. Common to all these is the idea of building infrastructure based on rich metadata for the resources in the research environment, that support their optimal re-use. Provision of all such resources and services will necessarily involve a mix of players, including commercial and public ones. A group of early-adopter EU member states is preparing the GO FAIR initiative [13], which is a proposal for the fast-track implementation of the EOSC. Ensuring that in such globally dispersed infrastructures all provided resources are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, as well as ensuring that the qualities of a service (i.e. what it does, and how), as well as the quality of a service (i.e. the degree of excellence), are appropriate for the researchers’ needs, requires widely shared and adopted standards and principles, In addition, there is a need for set of community-acceptable ‘rules of engagement’, that define how the resources within that community will/should function and promulgate themselves.
These rules of engagement may vary depending on the needs or constraints within any given community, but in each case, the FAIR guidelines assist the interaction between those who want to use community resources and those who provide them. FAIR guiding principles provide a scaffold for building such rules of engagement within each community.
(Read more: https://content.iospress.com/articles/information-services-and-use/isu824)