Back

EUA partners in European action to make research data FAIR

Making data FAIR – findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable – is becoming more and more the standard expectation with regard to European research projects. The future European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will also rely on FAIR data. To make this happen, EUA will be a core partner of the project “Fostering FAIR Data Practices in Europe” (FAIRsFAIR), which starts on 1st March 2019.

The three-year action aims to support the implementation of the EOSC by nurturing a FAIR data culture in Europe and the uptake of good practices in making research data FAIR. FAIRsFAIR will facilitate sharing of knowledge, expertise, guidelines, courses and education needed to turn the FAIR principles into reality. On the technical level, the project seeks to support the development and certification of repositories. By doing so it will contribute to the broader change required to achieve widespread adoption of FAIR practices within the EOSC and beyond.

In FAIRsFAIR, EUA will lead a work package on the promotion of FAIR data competences and research culture. This includes a landscape analysis of FAIR-related higher education programmes, for instance in data science, the creation of synergies with existing initiatives and the development of a FAIR competence framework. Later, these activities will be translated into education and training material such as model curricula, which will be supplemented by capacity building workshops aimed at universities.

EUA implements this work package together with the University of Minho in Portugal, the University of Göttingen and the University of Amsterdam, supported by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) in the UK.

FAIRsFAIR is a pan-European collaboration of 22 partners, of which the following six are core partners: the coordinator, Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) in the Netherlands, CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd. in Finland, DCC and STFC from the UK, Trust-IT from Italy and EUA. The kick-off meeting will take place on 14-15 March in Amsterdam.

FAIRsFAIR has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 project call H2020-INFRAEOSC-2018-5-2018-2019 (c), grant agreement 831558.