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Evaluating FAIR maturity through a scalable, automated, community-governed framework

Wilkinson, Mark D.; Dumontier, Michel; Sansone, Susanna-Assunta; Santos, Luiz Olavo Bonino da Silva; Prieto, Mario; Batista, Dominique; McQuilton, Peter; Kuhn, Tobias; Rocca-Serra, Philippe; Crosas, Merce; Schultes, Erik

SCIENTIFIC DATA
2019
VL / 6 - BP / - EP /
abstract
Transparent evaluations of FAIRness are increasingly required by a wide range of stakeholders, from scientists to publishers, funding agencies and policy makers. We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments. The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators - community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests - small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine "sees" when it visits that resource. We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.

AccesS level

Gold DOAJ, Green published, Green accepted

MENTIONS DATA