Time: 09:30 – 12:30
Room: TBD
Chair: Maaike Lisanne Verburg (DANS)
Code: W05
THIS WORKSHOP IS UNFORTUNATELY CANCELLED
FAIR-IMPACT is developing guidelines and a prototype to expose relevant information as metadata to facilitate discovery, provide context, support interoperability, and create a sense of trust in service providers and the services they offer. Transparent and linked information between objects, the repositories that hold or interact with them, and the registries that use this information, can be indexed, harvested, reused, and potentially validated against agreed criteria or by designated validation authorities to improve collaboration and trust between stakeholders.
This workshop aims to secure input from the global repository community to provide feedback on the work and help shape its further development. Through presentations, discussion, and hands-on work, participants will critically reflect on the current guidelines and inform next iterations by considering the application of the guidelines within their own organisations. Results from the workshop will be published onto Zenodo (participants will have the choice to be a named contributor or stay anonymous) and referenced in a next version of the guidelines.
Audience
Repositories, registries, and other data and metadata service providers. Specifically, individuals who are interested in increasing the findability and interoperability of their service and can critically reflect on their current position and drivers for change. Information providers (e.g. depositors) and information consumers (e.g. harvesters, funders, policy makers) can also benefit from joining the workshop.
Content
The FAIR-IMPACT project supports the implementation of FAIR-enabling practices, tools, and services. To this end, guidelines and a prototype are being developed to improve the transparency of, and trust in, repositories. The first iteration of the guidelines was published in October 2023[1]. These guidelines help to expose relevant information as metadata at the organisational and object level to facilitate discovery, provide context, and support interoperability. The guidelines will also recommend accompanying evidence in a uniform and transparent way, to create a sense of trust in the services themselves and service providers that expose information. Focus is put on exposing information about characteristics (e.g. business model, contact information), information that can help to inform a sense or status of trustworthiness (e.g. a certificate, preservation policy), and information relating to FAIRness of the digital objects held (e.g. assessment results, tool(s) used). The guidelines, and the prototype that will implement them, will be advanced through multiple iterations. To establish relevance of the outputs for the involved stakeholders, It is essential that these developments are informed by community-input. Our proposed workshop at Open Repositories 2024 aims to secure input from the global repository community to provide feedback on the work and help shape its further development.
The current research data environment is populated with digital objects, each with a range of characteristics, including those that, if exposed transparently and understandably, can inform perceptions and decisions related to FAIRness and trustworthiness. Complex collaborative coordination is required by all (human) actors and (machine) agents involved to carry out the processes and activities required to enable FAIRness throughout the object lifecycle. The ability to cooperate, interoperate, and deliver services to researchers depends on mutual trust between these different stakeholders. This trust can be fostered through the transparent sharing and exchange of relevant information about objects and the organisations that care for them. Transparent and linked information between the objects, the repositories that hold or interact with them, and the registries that use this information, can be indexed, harvested, reused, and potentially validated against agreed criteria or by designated validation authorities. Much of the information that needs to be made transparently available to inform trust is currently entered into multiple different services, registries, and identity providers, making it difficult to navigate and collect. This is the current status of the landscape that FAIR-IMPACT aims to improve through this work.
The workshop is designed to be bidirectionally beneficial, with the participants learning about the transparent exposure of important information for their organisation, and the organisers of the workshop obtaining targeted input for the next iterations. Participants from different stakeholders (repositories, registries, other service providers) will first learn about these current developments through a mix of short presentations and group work with ample room for questions and critical discussion. During the hands-on exercise, participants will critically reflect on the current guidelines and consider the application of them within their own organisations. How can the information best be exposed and how can other stakeholders then interact with the exposed information? What are the benefits to each organisation to implement these guidelines? In this structured assignment, participants will consider their current status and their organisations’ drivers for change, designing potential use cases in which the guidelines can provide a solution or improvement. Through a final discussion, participants will be able to provide meaningful input that will allow the development of the guidelines and prototype into something that will best fit the needs and desires of the community. Results from the workshop will be published onto Zenodo (participants will have the choice to be a named contributor or stay anonymous) and referenced in a next version of the guidelines.
Some added value scenarios that have been previously identified include, for example, reporting on repository-wide FAIR assessment outcomes, harvesting information for certification applications, and increased ease of landscape studies and information collection. We are interested to work together with the community to identify additional scenarios to improve general findability, interoperability, and trustworthiness of stakeholders, and discuss how this could be supported by our work.
Learning outcomes
This workshop will inform participants of the latest developments in the field of repository transparency and stakeholder interconnections being undertaken by the FAIR-IMPACT project. Participants will get the opportunity to shape these ongoing developments and consider the application to their own organisation. The aim of the workshop is to facilitate a bidirectional feedback loop between the participants and the organisers, so that the developments can best reflect the needs of the community.
Requirements
Participants are recommended to bring along a laptop to this workshop. Otherwise there is no requirement for prior knowledge or activities.
Reading the project’s milestone report on this topic could be recommended, but is not required:
- Verburg, M., Ulrich, R., L’Hours, H., Huber, R., Priddy, M., Davidson, J., Gonzalez-Beltran, A., Meijas, G., & Neidiger, C. (2023). M5.2 – Guidelines for repositories and registries on exposing repository trustworthiness status and FAIR data assessments outcomes (1.0). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10058634
