FAIR-IMPACT identified practices, policies, tools and technical specifications to guide researchers, repository managers, research performing organisations, policy makers and citizen scientists towards a FAIR data management cycle. The focus was on persistent identifiers (PIDs), metadata, ontologies, metrics, certification and interoperability, starting with real-life use cases on social sciences and humanities, the photon and neutron sciences, life sciences and agri-food and environmental sciences.
Browse below the use cases FAIR-IMPACT supported
EMBL-EBI - Providing harmonized information about organisations in identifiers.org using ROR registry
European Bioinformatics Institute is Europe’s largest provider of public biomolecular data resources. The institute is co-located with Elixir Hub and partnered with many relevant EU projects, including EOSC-Life, FREYA, and BY-COVID. In addition to supporting life sciences, EMBL-EBI is increasingly collaborating with other domains, e.g., social sciences in COVID-19 research. EMBL-EBI provides consistent access to life science data by leveraging compact identifiers through the Identifiers.org resolution service.
FAIR vocabularies in DANS Data Stations
DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) improved the FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) of its repository service by transitioning from a generic repository system, EASY, to four discipline-specific repositories called "Data Stations." Each Data Station is curated with relevant communities, enables the addition of custom metadata fields and discipline specific controlled vocabularies, improving metadata quality and interoperability. Data is mapped to and can be exported in multiple formats like DublinCore, DataCite, and Schema.org. The new Data Stations use Dataverse software, as opposed to EASY, which was based on the FEDORA system and became outdated.
PIDs as a cornerstone in actualising the FAIR principles within the LifeWatch infrastructure
LifeWatch ERIC is a European Research Infrastructure Consortium dedicated to advancing e-Science research in biodiversity and ecosystem studies, supporting global sustainability challenges. LifeWatch ERIC's EcoPortal plays a crucial role in ecological research, providing a Semantic Artefact Repository that consolidates core ontologies, domain-specific vocabularies, and reference lists. It offers essential services to facilitate seamless discovery and integration, exemplifying our commitment to advancing scientific collaboration and knowledge management.
Change triggers impacting PID generation for sensitive data within the Social Sciences
The UK Data Service (UKDS) is a partnership between the Universities of Essex, Manchester, UCL, Edinburgh and Jisc and the UK service provider to the Consortium of Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA). The focus of this use case is on the research ‘studies’ of sensitive nature deposited at the UK Data Service and the subsequent derived data products. The sensitivity issue is the handling of information containing directly identifiable personal data or data that has the capacity to lead to reidentification, either through related variables within the dataset or through linkage with other data. We need to consider the implications involved in handling sensitive data for PID management and associated kernel metadata of a related identifier/object, e.g. for a repository identifier (“is currently approved to hold sensitive data”) or a researcher identifier (“has current credentials for accessing sensitive data”).
INRAE - Providing a recommendations document on PIDs usages
INRAE is the French National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and the Environment. It proposes, through research, innovation and support for public policies, new directions to support the emergence of sustainable agricultural and food systems. INRAE is the first French institute to have a Department for Open Science. The objective: is to respond to the challenges linked to the opening of scientific research in a context of digital development and increasingly strong expectations from society.
Referencing software source code artifacts: identifiers for digital object
Software Heritage addresses the challenge of dealing with the different level of granularity of software artifacts: source code files, source trees, commits, and other objects typically found in version control systems. SWHID is a PID, independent of the development platform or technology, that can be computed from the designated object itself without needing a register to maintain the correspondence. The proposal is to advance the use of SWHID for referencing software source code artifacts.
PIDs for instruments in photon and neutron facilities science. Use case by STFC
The proposal of this use case is to advance the use of PIDs for instruments, such as instruments, devices, softwares and services, in the context of photon and neutron facilities (research infrastructures). This is an area of great interest in the community, for example assisting with assessing the impact of individual instruments. The RDA has a Working Group on Persistent Identification of Instruments that takes a cross-domain approach, but its specific application to PaN has not been fully explored.
Providing documentation on harmonised and citable PIDs for subsets of protected data. Use case by EMBL-EBI
European Bioinformatics Institute is Europe’s largest provider of public biomolecular data resources. The institute is co-located with Elixir Hub and partnered up in many relevant EU projects, among others EOSC-Life, FREYA, and BY-COVID. This use case will explore PID practices in relation to complex data citation and sensitive data for the life science domain, and provide documentation on best practices to be adopted across domains. In addition to supporting life sciences, EMBL-EBI is increasingly also collaborating with other domains, e.g. social sciences in the context of Covid-19 research. EMBL-EBI provides consistent access to life science data by leveraging on compact identifiers through the Identifiers.org resolution service. This service will be fine-tuned during the course of the project to ensure alignment with community FAIR practices and the broader EOSC context.
Encouraging and supporting researchers in producing FAIR computational workflows. Use case by University of Manchester
This use case is based around the University of Manchester’s work with Persistent Identifiers in data production workflows via its involvement in the WorkflowHub - a registry of computational FAIR workflows. WorkflowHub is sponsored by the European RI Cluster EOSC-Life, the European Research Infrastructure ELIXIR and multiple EOSC projects (BY-COVID, BioDT and EuroScienceGateway). Its initial users were from within the life sciences working with COVID-19 workflows, but is now used by over 140 research groups and projects across disciplines.