The FAIRest of Them All: Using the FAIR Data Principles to Evaluate Open Data Repositories

The live session took place on Monday, August 10. You can access the recording of the session by selecting the "Access recording" button and using password: j522!0mK

Folder of documents for participants
Session Format: An interactive workshop introducing FAIR principles, including hands-on group discussions and activities where participants will share their approaches and work together using guiding questions to find and assess a data repository and reflect on using FAIR principles to support open data sharing.

Objective: Come to this interactive workshop to learn how to apply FAIR Data Principles (2016) - which were created around a set of 14 metrics to evaluate and quantify the features of open data, specifically the aspects of: (F) findability, (A) accessibility, (I) interoperability, and (R) reusability - followed by hands-on activities where participants will share their approaches and work together using guiding questions to find and assess a data repository and reflect on using FAIR principles to support open data sharing in your work setting. As funders and publishers are increasingly encouraging and requiring researchers to publish their data, librarians have stepped in to provide expertise around choosing where and how to best prepare, deposit, and publish datasets. This session will provide a pathway for librarians to identify and critically appraise existing data repositories in accordance with the FAIR principles in order to provide guidance on where to deposit data, and how to make data meet quality standards upon publication -- see the detailed session agenda at: https://tinyurl.com/FAIRestData-MLASessionAgenda.

Methods: The presenters will introduce the FAIR Data Principles and facilitate a discussion where participants share their current practice. Next, participants will receive a scenario: Someone comes to you and wants to deposit a dataset on [….participants will receive different topic or other focused example here…], and they will then work in groups to evaluate a provided short list of 1 or 2 topic-relevant repositories by applying the FAIR Principles to evaluate the repository/ies as a whole (including possibly assessing one of the datasets published within the repositories), ultimately working to determine whether they would recommend the repository/ies to the researchers to use to deposit their data. Afterwards, all of the participants will discuss what they found and one or two takeaways about what they’ll bring back to their institution or daily work from what they discussed and discovered during the session. A resource folder will be provided with materials from the session in openly licensed, editable formats for participants to adapt and repurpose for training or workshops of their own.

Participant Engagement: Throughout the session, the presenters will encourage brainstorming and sharing of techniques and sources for finding datasets or repositories, hands-on use of FAIR principles to evaluate datasets and repositories, and a concluding discussion on how participants will use what they explored in the future.

Sponsors: PH/HA Caucus and Data Caucus