WORK PACKAGES UPDATE (07/09/2014)
Work Package 1
The key decision of the FAIRport inaugural group was to develop community based minimal guidelines to make adoption in the widest possible community as easy and likely as possible.
The main activity of Work Package 1 has been the drafting and refining of 'Guiding Principles' for FAIR data publishing. As discussed at the inaugural workshop in Leiden, we should try to find guiding principles that are minimal and generic, so that all colleagues engaged in any form of data stewardship can use them to check if their approach would generate FAIR data.
Obviously, such 'Guiding Principles' do not contain specific implementation choices and therefore, by themselves are not very practical. We therefore also developed some early ‘Explanatory Notes’ and thoughts about how to implement FAIRports in annexes to the Guiding Principles. It should be emphasized that endorsing the Guiding Principles will not enforce any of the more practical suggestions for implementation.
The Guiding Principles can be viewed in DRAFT and can be commented on at the pages of a dedicated FORCE11 Working Group for wider critical review. In parallel we will run the principles by the Technical Coordinators group of ELIXIR and subsequently by the Heads of Nodes. We will also hand out the draft at the upcoming RDA meeting. The actual endorsement procedure will only be launched after agreement in the working group. We aim at starting the endorsement process soon after the RDA plenary in Amsterdam (i.e. by the first of October 2014). The FAIR guidelines have also been discussed in a breakout group at the 3 September workshop at NIH where the shaping of the future of BD2K was discussed.
The drafting process has been challenging but also very rewarding and we believe the result may have serious impact on future machine readable data publishing and stewardship. The following quote of Mark Wilkinson is probably reflecting the feeling of the entire group:
'This has been a very exciting, thought-provoking, and collegial process! I have to say, personally, how much I have enjoyed being a part of this group!'
Work Package 2
The earlier decision of this Work Package to point to the JCDP as a first step to 'engage' with the FAIRport initiative has worked well so far. Today [Sept 3, 2014] there are [81] organization level endorsements of the JCDP and [176] endorsements at the 'personal title' level.
It was discussed with Maryann Martone, chair of FORCE11, that these organizations and people may also be interested in reviewing and endorsing the minimal FAIR Guiding Principles, as it relates very closely to good data citation practices.
We feel that reviewing and endorsing the FAIR Guiding Principles via FORCE11 once the time is ripe is a good approach. Next step will be to systematically approach the list of 'enablers' that we identified at the FAIRport meeting and that may 'fill in' part of the total FAIRport ecosystem, such as VIVO (organizations), ORCID (contributors of science), ELIXIR, BD2K, repositories etc.