Lightweight FAIR assessment in the OpenAIRE Validator
Creators: name: Czerniak, Andreas
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: FAIR Assessment
FAIRification Process
Resource type adaptation

description: In April 2020, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) Working Group “FAIR data maturity model” published their first draft of the FAIR Data Maturity Model with specification and guidelines, establishing a set of indicators for assessing adherence to the FAIR principles. In June 2020, the final document was published. OpenAIRE has defined a set of guidelines that establish the rules that content providers should adopt in order to ensure that their content can be aggregated by the OpenAIRE infrastructure. In practice, the OpenAIRE Guidelines helps content providers managers expose publications, datasets and CRIS metadata via the OAI-PMH protocol in order to integrate with OpenAIRE infrastructure. OpenAIRE guidelines are firstly published in 2010 and the adaptation focus on the latest Guidelines for institutional and thematic repository managers v4, which covers not only literature publications but also DataSets as a resource type. Beyond the need to expose metadata using global standards, new developments have emerged relating to the application of FAIR principles to records deposited in repositories. The FAIR principles intend to define a minimal set of related but independent and separable guiding principles and practices that enable both machines and humans to find, access, interoperate and re-use data and metadata. The indicators that are used in the FAIR data maturity model are derived from the FAIR principles and aim to formulate measurable aspects of each principle that can be used by evaluation approaches. Taking into account these developments and the need to evaluate the FAIRness of content providers, OpenAIRE is updating its guidelines in order to cover the FAIR principles elements, and also adapting the FAIR RDA Data Maturity Model indicators in OpenAIRE Validator. The Validator is available to every logged-in user via the PROVIDE dashboard and is intended to provide an impression of the FAIRness of their repository. The FAIR Maturity Model Indicators, as core criteria to assess the implementation level of the FAIR (Data) principles, implemented in the OpenAIRE Validator, aims to offer to the content providers managers, a way to assess the implementation of FAIR (Data) Principles. This implementation in the Validator will deploy a specific guideline to evaluate the level of adoption of the FAIR Principles by content providers. The presentation will briefly introduce to the mentioned guidelines and will shown how the FAIRificaton process will be done with strategic procedure of adaptations of the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Specification, their implementation in the existing OpenAIRE validator service, and conclude with the introduction to evaluate a institutional, thematic, or data repository in the PROVIDE dashboard. Being part of OpenAIRE, all content providers assure its compatibility with global standards and interoperability based on the adoption of OpenAIRE guidelines. More specifically the FAIR assessment will leverage a more swift adoption and implementation process of FAIR principles in repositories, enabling a faster identification of trustworthy repositories, thus accelerating the building of EOSC services upon these infrastructures.