Data repository FAIRness: between certification and good practices

The EOSC Symposium, has seen two intense and stimulating days for all stakeholders to contribute to discussion on the implementation of the EOSC. On 27th November 2019, Francoise Genova, an ESCAPE member from CNRS/Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg and a member of the FAIR working group of the EOSC executive board, co-chaired the breakout session "FAIR Service Certification".

Organised by the EOSC FAIR Working Group, this session had the objective to gather inputs from the audience on FAIR certification of services, including data repositories - requirements, feedback, etc. « We worked on the metrics and certification of data repositories as well as of the other elements of the system that make data FAIR, which means Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable », explains Françoise Genova.

Three presentations addressed different aspects of this issue:

• Andreas Jaunsen, Nordforsk / NeIC talked about the way to assess the FAIRness of data from northern Europe repositories : EOSC-Nordic: FAIR Maturity evaluation of data repositories 
• Hylke Koers, SURFsara. detailed the Services to support FAIR data. Recommendation and actions
• Owen Appleton, EGI.eu. proposed an evaluation context for services. This context is called SHARP for Sustainaible, Helpful, Accessible, Reusable, Professional FAIR data needs SHARP services: An approach to enabling and supporting open data for EOSC

The discussion then continued on the types of services to be certified and the types of criteria that justify certification of some types of service first. « We must identify the services to be certified in priority but we must also rely on good practices to improve all the components of the FAIR system," says Françoise Genova, because it is not reasonable to certify everything. »

The audience consisted of service providers especially repositories, software and also service users including data producers, researchers, science users.

« The audience was very engaged, and the discussion of high quality, concludes Françoise, it provided important elements for the work of the FAIR Working Group ».

ESCAPE is enabling open science interoperability and software re-use for the data analysis of the ESCAPE ESFRI projects based on FAIR principles.

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Credits photo: Sarah Jones, FAIR WG chair