In April 2023, the WorldFAIR project produced its first policy brief, which made seven policy recommendations relevant to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), drawing on project results and discussions held at relevant workshops. As highlighted in the policy brief, the project’s Key Exploitable Results (KERs) are directly relevant to the EOSC Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) and the EOSC Interoperability Framework, metadata and ontologies, and FAIR metrics and certification.
Most specifically, WorldFAIR contributes to the SRIA in the following ways:
✔ Case Study Recommendations and CDIF will ‘enhance’ and add detail to the EOSC Interoperability Framework. (EOSC SRIA v.1.1, 8.6.2.1. Standards and Tools, p.176)
✔ Standards-based approach: CDIF will provide recommendations on standards to be used to enhance interoperability and combinability; international and engaged with research communities. (EOSC SRIA v.1.1, 5.7.2. Gaps, p.112)
✔ Engagement with and of research communities: empowerment and facilitation of research communities to develop FAIR practices and Interoperability Frameworks. FIPs are an important tool for this. (EOSC SRIA v.1.1, 5.7.2. Gaps, p.112)
✔ Interoperability for data combination: CDIF will propose good practices for a range of interoperability concerns, including semantics, to improve harmonisation of practices across disciplines. (EOSC SRIA v.1.1, 5.7.2. Gaps, p.113)
In addition to the work of the WorldFAIR Case Studies, the major contribution of the WorldFAIR is to the EOSC Interoperability Framework through the CDIF:
[…] the WorldFAIR project makes a significant contribution to the EOSC Interoperability Framework in two important respects. First, the project underlines, and puts into practice, the need to engage research disciplines, at a global scale, in the development of agreements and frameworks for FAIR. Second, the CDIF identifies a set of functional requirements to support FAIR and identifies existing or emerging standards and protocols that can be used across domains. The CDIF is categorically not a new standard intended to replace others, but a framework of existing cross-domain standards or emerging protocols, which will add significant detail and actionability to the EOSC Interoperability Framework.
These policies will also be useful for other initiatives, including the African Open Science Platform (AOSP), a pan-African initiative guided by guided strategy, produced by a CODATA-led pilot project. which is being coordinated by an office established by NRF in South Africa and has nodes in Egypt, Kenya, and Malawi. Hosted at JKUAT in Nairobi, the Kenya node has a mission for capacity building and has already established links with APHRC and the INSPIRE projects. The Case Study on Population health will directly work with AOSP to develop some of these ideas, especi ally around the development of Trusted Research Environments (TRE) for the shared use of diverse data under secure and safe conditions; this is currently under development in cooperation with the Health Data Research Innovation Gateway (HRDUK).
The specific policy recommendations made to EOSC are summarised thus:
✔ Sufficiently Detailed, Standardised and Interoperable Metadata: Support is necessary for the development, adoption and implementation of standards and for the increased use of tools for automated metadata management.
✔Community FAIR Practices: Research communities need to be encouraged and facilitated in the process of exploring, declaring and implementing the FAIR practices that are most appropriate to their domain, while of course aligning with cross-domain standards where possible.
✔ Cross-Domain Data Combination: Investment is needed to improve the capacity to provide standards, tools and metadata to support cross-domain interoperability and data granularity.
✔ Fine-Grained Access Control: Systems that can support negotiation of access to data in a dynamic fashion are needed in order to responsibly meet the demand.
✔ Data Engineering: Achieving a network for FAIR data exchange, or the EOSC vision of ‘a web of FAIR data and services’, will require a shift from a ‘bibliographic’ practice to a data engineering practice.
✔ Support for Research Infrastructures: A key task of EOSC, and similar initiatives, is to ensure that research infrastructures have the capacity to partner with researchers and to provide them with the integrated or integratable data they need, upstream of analysis.
✔ International Partnerships: EOSC should actively partner with existing international data infrastructures and organisations that maintain standards and metadata schema (particularly those related to the UN data ecosystem), with inter-governmental initiatives and with global representative bodies such as the International Science Council and the International Scientific Unions.
The final WorldFAIR Policy Brief is available here. It will synthesise and categorise the recommendations from the case studies and the synthesis work, while highlighting the most important policy recommendations for EOSC. It is envisaged, however, that many of the principle recommendations will remain substantively the same.
In this policy brief the WorldFAIR project makes seven policy recommendations relevant to EOSC. Evidence and analysis is presented for each recommendation. The Policy Brief and recommendations draw on project deliverables and discussions held at workshops including project participants and wider stakeholders.
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