By the end of the project, the 11 WorldFAIR case studies will have produced discipline-specific guidelines and recommendations that can be used by the wider community as-is or further modified for specific needs, as well as training materials to support their uptake and community adoption. These efforts contribute to capacity-building in the community, promoting good research practices, facilitating collaboration, and advancing the FAIR principles, ultimately contributing to increasing the quality, integrity, and impact of research outcomes.
Chemistry
The Chemistry case study outlined a framework for reporting FAIR-enabled chemistry data that are Reliable, Interpretable, Processable and Exchangeable, or RIPE for sharing. The broad strokes guidance described in ‘D3.1 Digital recommendations for Chemistry FAIR data policy and practice’ addresses descriptive metadata, file formats, unit representation, terminology and other digital motifs for describing chemical data in repositories and other systems and workflows. The framework is intended to facilitate implementation of standards by tool builders, database developers and other service providers to further empower the research community to share and reuse data and will continue to evolve as emerging standards mature and broader implementation informs best practices.
The IUPAC FAIR Chemistry Cookbook was developed to support various user groups in the chemical sciences and allied fields with training in the FAIR principles and machine-readable chemical data. This web resource is designed to serve as a toolbox of interactive recipes for implementing FAIR at various levels and with different user experience, ranging from educators who need demonstration resources for instruction, to students who learn by doing, to practitioners who need a quick orientation on a tool or resource. The platform can be readily accessed with broadly available online infrastructure and exemplifies the FAIR principles and best practices in cheminformatics. As further described in ‘D3.2 Training Package: FAIR Chemistry Cookbook’, the sustainable infrastructure invites practical contributions from chemists, data scientists, educators, and students worldwide and enables IUPAC to leverage the collective expertise of the community in best practices for managing and reusing chemical data.
Nanomaterials
The case study on nanomaterials had a strong focus on collating and integrating existing resources developed across a range of projects and collaborations, and documenting the current best practice into the Nanomaterials FIP with guidance on how to apply the FIP and apply the various FAIR enabling resources included in the FIP. Worked examples of nanomaterials FAIR workflows and resulting FAIR data packages have been developed and all of the information is presented in self-guided training materials via the community-developed NanoCommons User Guide, which is a “commons” in the sense that it is collectively owned and developed for the collective good. All WorldFAIR nanomaterials-related deliverables and milestones are provided as training materials to support the community in its FAIRification efforts.
Agricultural Biodiversity
This Case Study gathered several collaborating initiatives, proving that an inclusive and translational approach to data re-use promotes a mutually beneficial knowledge transfer, and creates or strengthens collaborations. The Case Study team was composed of information specialists, data scientists, computer scientists and researchers in reproductive biology that exchanged knowledge and experiences to create recommendations, best practices and assessment tools tailored to this domain, which were lacking.
Ocean Science and Sustainable Development
This Case Study has contributed to the creation of training materials on Ocean Teacher Global Academy, an International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange (IODE) programme component parallel to the Ocean Data and Information System (ODIS). This course is periodically run and has had global subscription. Additionally, this Work Package (WP) has dedicated time to assisting ODIS nodes (especially those in the developing world, but also many in Europe) develop their own capacities to share verifiably FAIR, linked open data.
Social Surveys
The social surveys case study established a set of best practice guidelines and a process model for the management of the survey data harmonisation process for social surveys. These guidelines were based on the existing practices of the project partners in the harmonisation of the European Social Survey and the International Social Survey Programme data. These best practice guidelines are designed for adoption and reuse both within the social science data archive community, and other organisations interested in survey harmonisation.
Browse all WorldFAIR published deliverables on our Zenodo community
