FAIRly Specialist? Generic vs Disciplinary implications for FAIR-enabling Repositories

The FAIR acronym of Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and ReUsable is specified through 15 Principles that range from the specific and testable (‘assigned an identifier’) to the more general and aspirational (‘richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes’). They are supported by indicators, including those developed through the Research Data Alliance, and a range of emerging tools that specify metrics and apply tests to digital objects including traditional research data, ontologies and software.

For trustworthy digital repositories, enabling FAIR digital objects has been added to the range of outcomes expected from their retention, curation and preservation of assets relevant to research.

This talk will consider the FAIR Principles from the perspective of the UK Data Service as the UK service provider to the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) and its lead partner, the UK Data Archive, as a trustworthy digital repository. It will include insights from the CESSDA Trust & Landscape group, the EOSC Long Term Retention Task Force, the EOSC FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects Task Force, the closing phase of the FAIR IMPACT project and the initial stages of the EOSC EDEN and FIDELIS projects.

We will discuss where FAIR-enabling for generic and disciplinary repositories align, where they differ and how they can, together, improve the levels of care provided across the digital object ecosystem. From a metrics and testing perspective, we will review the benchmarks set for social science metrics and how they can be supported and improved through community participation and consensus. Furthermore we will consider the transparency of metadata at the repository and object levels and where there remain significant challenges for tools seeking to automate and scale FAIR assessments.