Scientific Papers

Journal/Conference:

Geospatial Sensing 2020 and Patterns


The bigger picture

In recent years, there has been a strong recommendation from funders, publishers, and research organizations on adopting the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) principles to maximize scientific data availability and reuse. However, measuring the FAIRness of research data in practice is challenging. The number of datasets has proliferated in scientific research, and new datasets are emerging from various sources. This paper aims to contribute to the FAIR data assessment through a set of core metrics elaborating the principles and an automated tool that supports FAIR evaluation based on the metrics. The metrics are built on established work and consider standard data practices. The tool development is collaborative and iterative. The consultative process has motivated the repositories to refine their data services. Further pilots are planned with the repositories in the European Open Science Cloud. The broader goal is to adapt the solution to assess other digital objects such as vocabularies and software.