[Peter Wittenburg]

Meeting objectives
Trust in data is crucial for improving data sharing and reuse. Therefore, inititives such as DSA and WDS have agreed to build CTS, a harmonised set of rules to audit repositories. With the FAIR principles we have a complementary set of guidelines that establishes criteria about the objects (data, software, etc.) stored in such repositories. Many initiatives are now working on rule sets to assess FAIRness of digital objects. Therefore, the BoF is meant to bring the experts behind CTS together with those experts who are working on FAIRmetrics to identify overlap and gaps in the rule sets, to come to a better understanding how FAIRmetrics initiatives can collaborate under the umbrella of RDA and how such rule sets should develop in future. Given the expectations from various stakeholders the coming RDA meeting is an excellent possibility to start such an interaction towards harmonisation. Experts from GOFAIR and involved in CTS see the need to involve a broader group of experts from scientific domains in these discussions.
 
Meeting agenda
The session will 
– briefly reiterate on the FAIR principles and their overlap with CTS
– give space for experts to report on their efforts to establish FAIRmetrix
– initiate an open discussion about possible rule sets to assess FAIRness
– work out a roadmao for further joing actions under the RDA umbrella
 
Short description
Trust in data and its creation, description, management, stewardship and delivery processes are crucial for a functioning data sharing and reuse domain. Actors and here in particular machines, are acting increasingly anonymously and therefore, they need to rely on mechanisms that indicate trustworthiness. One way to increase trustworthiness is to request certification according to defined rule sets. 
This was the reason to start initiatives and define standards such as ISO ISO 16363:2012, DIN 31644, Data Seal of Approval and World Data Systems to testify trustworthiness of repositories. Repositories are seen as “abstract” entities that take care of data and offer access to them, i.e. they take over functions such as the storage, the management and stewardship, and access to data after creators have deposited them. Such repositories apply different models of how to map the different functions on to organisational structures and in particular to include the scientific communities in stewardship processes. The above mentioned early initiatives were widely inspired by the OAIS reference model and developed rule sets aligned with early experiences. In the meantime Data Seal of Approval and World Data Systems joined forces within the Research Data Alliance to create a unified rule set called CoreTrustSeal which is now being applied by many repositories globally. 
Making statements about repositories, however, is not sufficient to make data sharing and reuse more efficient. The FAIR principles provide widely agreed guidelines for proper data creation, management and stewardship. The need for a FAIRification of data is not debated anymore and therefore it is a logical consequence that there are now some initiatives that are working on schemas and procedures that could assess the degree of FAIRness of data. As CoreTrustSeal is a widely accepted standard for certifying repositories it would be a great and necessary achievement, if there would be broad agreement on a standard to measure FAIRness of data. Also we expect an ongoing development and refinement of the existing certification schemes to meet the increasing requirements of automation of data processing. 
For the research communities data certification is a high priority topic since it will have an influence on data practices. This explains their great interest in participating in the discussions from the beginning. In Europe the various ESFRI research infrastructure projects collaborating within RDA-GEDE are an excellent umbrella to bring together not only those initiatives that are working on certification schemes such as developed by GO FAIR, but to also include interested experts from the various research infrastructures. For us RDA seems to be the right platform to not only organise a first BoF, but dependent on the results, to also look for ways to continue the interactions to come to an agreed standard and to discuss future perspectives. 
The 13th Plenary in Philadelphia is a timely event to start this interaction, since recent discussions of this topic have shown that there are widely differing opinions that urgently need to be synchronised. We will invite key players from CTS (DSA, WDS), GO FAIR, other initiatives working on FAIR-metrics and interested members from scientific disciplines to this BoF, which of course will be open to anyone interested.
 
Additional links to informative material
CTS: https://www.coretrustseal.org/ 
FAIR: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618 
FAIRmetrics: http://fairmetrics.org/ 
GO FAIR: https://www.go-fair.org/2017/12/11/metrics-evaluation-fairness/

Discussion