Fair data
Storyboard Text
- Hi! Nice to see you. I was just at a really interesting workshop.
- Oh really? What was it about?
- It was one of the library’s workshops on the FAIR principles. I feel like this is really going to help my team.
- FAIR principles? What’s that?
- FAIR principles are guidelines for managing your research data and support data reuse.
- Do you remember that project we worked on a few years ago, and couldn’t remember what parameters we used or how we named files? When we tried to look at the data again last year to see if we could reuse some of it?
- Yeah, that was a mess. We wasted a lot of time. That clever system we came up with to name our files wasn’t very easy to remember.
- So what are FAIR principles?
- Well, FAIR is an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, andReusable
- So, Findable is so that people should be able to find it? Like on Google?
- Yeah, data and metadata should be easy to find. But not just for people. Computers too. So the data and metadata should be machine-readable.
- And I guess it helps if the data are accessible somewhere other than my USB drive at home. I wonder where I put that…
- Exactly, but to be Accessible, people who want to use your data should know how they can access it, and that metadata – data about the data – is available even if the data isn’t.
- What about the “I”? Inter…what was it?
- Interoperable. So the data and metadata need to follow accepted standards. And avoid rare and seldom used file formats.
- So, Interoperable data means that you should save the data in a widely used file format that is supported by common operating systems and can be opened in several programs.
- Yeah, exactly. They even used that example in the workshop!
- Interoperalbe data would also have helped us with our filenaming issue… One of the recommendations was to use YYMMDD
- Reusable seems straightforward?
- Yeah, the data and metadata should be readable for humans and machines. But you should also have information about the study, what you used to collect or produce the data, and what software you used.
- They said you should also mention under what conditions on how the data can be reused and specify a license.
- Oh, like a CC BY license? So you still get attribution if someone decides to Reuse your data?
- Anyway, I’m excited to get back to my team and try to put these principles into practice! They mentioned that publishing our FAIR data might even boost citations on our papers.
- You’ll be a professor in no time, then!
- Or at least boost the impact of our research. It could even help research groups in other countries build on our research.
- That’s great. I’ll have to sign up for the next workshop!
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