Wow! The two years of WorldFAIR have flown by and it is hard to believe that the project itself has finished.
From a CODATA perspective, and I think from that of many of the project partners, WorldFAIR was a wonderful opportunity to accelerate work that was already underway or at least conceived. So it should come as no surprise that this work will continue as WorldFAIR+. More on that below.
First, however, I would like to thank all the project partners for their efforts on the project. It has been a hugely rewarding and enriching experience. CODATA and RDA have a shared mission to enable international collaboration to make research data more accessible and usable. That global perspective and way of working is imprinted in our ‘DNA’. We are grateful to the European Commission for farsighted funding rules that allowed WorldFAIR to be genuinely global. I am convinced that we have contributed positively to the discussion of FAIR in Europe and EOSC, while being a useful reminder of the benefits of engaging internationally, particularly in relation to data and metadata standards.
I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to engage in detail with so many case studies and research areas. This has been a fascinating and rewarding experience. For anyone interested in how data works in scientific practice, I commend the many outputs from the case studies. There are too many to mention all of them, but here is a selection which will give a flavour of the sort of useful outputs: a ‘cookbook’ for FAIR in chemistry; a vision for how a multifaceted discipline like geochemistry can use FAIR Implementation Profiles to advance FAIRness and coordinate activities; recommendations and training materials for how to make population health data more interoperable and FAIR; a practical and targeted rubric for assessing the FAIRness of plant-pollinator data; practical recommendations for how GLAM sector archives can take steps to improve practice, in line with the FAIR principles, but addressing the specific needs and challenges of cultural heritage.
It was the task of Work Package 2, led by CODATA, to provide a synthesis from WorldFAIR. This included a final ‘Policy Brief’ which presented the most important policy relevant recommendations and our call for a shift from a bibliographic approach to an engineering approach to data stewardship. It also comprised a synthesis of the WorldFAIR experience with FIPs which fed into our recommendations for FAIR assessment that is more grounded in domain practice. Finally, it also includes the Cross-Domain Interoperability Framework (CDIF), which provides recommendations and guidance for five core functional requirements for interoperability and data combination. This is just a start. Further profiles are discussed and work will continue beyond the WorldFAIR project.
Which brings us to next steps… WorldFAIR+ will continue and extend the work of the project. It is currently conceived as a ‘federation’ of aligned projects, with separate funding but common objectives. These include refining the WorldFAIR methodology, particularly concerning the use of FIPs and the CDIF; expanding the number of case studies (or petals in the WorldFAIR flower diagram and logo); and implementing and testing CDIF, to improve and extend the profiles. We are keen to continue working with the current case studies, as possible, and invite potential new case studies to collaborate with us. Two new case studies involving emergencies data will start imminently and others are the subject of funding proposals. More on these exciting developments soon! Please follow CODATA and WorldFAIR for news and get in touch if you would like to discuss how to be involved.
