EOSC Metrics and Certification Reports Published

‘Recommendations on FAIR metrics for EOSC’ and ‘Recommendations on certifying services required to enable FAIR within EOSC’.

The ‘Recommendations on FAIR Metrics for EOSC’ document contains an analysis of activities relevant to the definition of FAIR Metrics in the EOSC context. It makes recommendations on the definition and implementation of metrics, proposes a set of metrics for FAIR data in EOSC to be extensively tested, offers an analysis of gaps and potential opportunities for extension, and defines priorities for future work. FAIR is an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable - an approach to research data management that has been widely supported internationally, and continues to be refined for different research contexts. The provision of FAIR research outputs is a key requirement for participation in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The ‘Recommendations on certifying services required to enable FAIR within EOSC’ document contains an analysis of activities relevant to certification of the services required to enable FAIR research outputs within EOSC as of November 2020. It discusses incentivisation and support, offers an analysis of gaps and potential opportunities for extension, and defines priorities for future work. 

The EOSC FAIR Working Group  ensures a community-sourced approach to the challenge of implementing FAIR data principles. It has been in place for two years and has widely consulted on the recommendations before the final release and ratification of the reports by the EOSC Executive Board. DRI Director Natalie Harrower is a member of the EOSC FAIR Working Group and is one of the authors of the reports.

The recommendations outlined in these reports also build heavily on the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group (HLEG) on FAIR, of which the DRI Director was also a member. This group published ‘Turning FAIR into Reality’ in 2018, a publication which was both a report and an action plan for turning FAIR into reality.

The Digital Repository of Ireland preserves and provides access to research data and other research outputs in alignment with the FAIR principles, and is committed to supporting best practice in research data management and Open Research. Natalie Harrower serves on ALLEA’s Open Science Taskforce, and DRI is actively involved in the business and the work of the Research Data Alliance (RDA), as a member of the Organisational Advisory Board and various working and interesting groups, as a current partner in the RDA4EOSC project (managed by Timea Biro), and previously through the Horizon 2020 project RDAEU4, the FP7 project RDAEU3, and the hosting of RDA’s 3rd Plenary in March 2014. At the national level, DRI leads several aspects of the National Open Research Forum (NORF), with Natalie Harrower on the Steering Committee, Daniel Bangert as the National Open Research Coordinator, Kathryn Cassidy on the Infrastructure Working Group, and Timea Biro co-chairing the FAIR Working Group.