Health Research Board Workshop: FAIR Data Stewardship for Open Science, 16-17 January 2017, Dublin

Dr. Sandra Collins (National Library of Ireland) will present on the Research Data Alliance at the upcoming HRB Workshop, FAIR Data Stewardship for Open Science. Further information on the event is available here. 

In coming years, researchers in receipt of public funding will be expected to properly manage research data and enhance their availability with as few restrictions as possible. Good data stewardship is rapidly becoming an essential part of modern science. To facilitate good data stewardship and to promote open science, a broad community of stakeholders recently published a set of guiding principles for contemporary scholarly data publishing, with the goal of ensuring that scientific data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR).

The FAIR principles have been embraced by both the European Commission and the G20. These principles have been elaborated to provide specific guidance for the kinds of properties and behaviours data should exhibit that allow them to be discovered and used by both humans and machines. FAIR Data can also be positioned in a broader scope of data stewardship, which relates to concerns before, during and after data creation and manipulation. Concerns such as how data will be created, in which context, where are they going to be stored, what are the creation, validation and publication process, what are the medium- and long-term sustainability plans for the data, among others.

The HRB’s is committed to providing hands-on support and advice to researchers submitting proposals to EC, HRB and/or other national funders in recognition that research data are an important and expensive output of the scholarly research process, across all disciplines. So this two-day workshop is designed to introduce the HRB research community, including managers, librarians and other research support staff from different Institutions, to the essentials of FAIR Data Stewardship. The workshop is also in line with the approach the HRB is taking:

• towards research data and data sharing
• on the need to comply with good practice in the use and reuse of research data
• to preserve and share research data and datasets in a manner that maximises their long-term value.