TOMORROW at Virtual SciDatCon 2021: Global Open Science and Supporting FAIR – 27 October 2021

Tomorrow, Weds 27 October is the penultimate day of Virtual SciDataCon 2021.  We hope you have enjoyed the sessions and have been able to follow the themes of interest.  SciDataCon will close on Thursday 28 October, 11:00-13:00 UTC, with a Plenary Session exploring global collaboration ‘Organisational Interoperability is Critical for Data Interoperability’.

For our penultimate day, there are two themes: two sessions will explore the Global Open Science Cloud initiative, providing an opportunity for the thematic Working Groups and the disciplinary Case Studies to describe their work and discuss their approach. The other strand of three sessions covers various ways in which activities are supporting FAIR.

Global Open Science

Developing Cooperation and Alignment Between Open Science Clouds: governance and sustainability, policy and legal, technical infrastructure, data interoperability, Wednesday 27 October, 11:00-12:30 UTC: REGISTER

This interactive workshop session will provide an overview of the activities of four thematic working groups established by the Global Open Science Cloud initiative.  Four Working Groups have been established: Governance, Strategy and Sustainability; Policy and Legal; Technical Infrastructure; Data Interoperability. Each Working Group will give a short presentation, outlining its draft workplan and objectives and detailing the areas which it has identified to share information, develop cooperation and to explore alignment.  The presentations will be followed by structured discussion.  We invite participants to make recommendations for this work and to help identify areas where cooperation can be supported by the Working Groups.

The Global Open Science Cloud Initiative: Mobilizing Disciplinary Case Studies, Wednesday 27 October, 13:00-14:30 UTC: REGISTER

Under the umbrella of the GOSC Initiative, this session will continue the dialogue between worldwide research e-infrastructures from a disciplinary demonstration perspective. The Initiative has identified five initial case studies in the areas of space physics, diffraction data, biodiversity, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) -13 for climate change, and health research. The case studies will explore practical examples of cooperation, alignment and interoperability between Open Science infrastructures, in specific research contexts. The objectives of this session are to briefly summarize the progress of the GOSC Case Studies and to elaborate the specific scenarios within the selected case studies. An introductory talk will be given by the session chair, briefly describing the GOSC Initiative. This will be followed by a description of the five case studies along with the identification of questions for discussion by the audience. The session will conclude with a 20-minute discussion with all the participants.

Supporting FAIR

Certifying FAIR: The GO FAIR Foundation’s Pioneer Program to bootstrap community development of FAIR certification for events, people, and technology, Wednesday 27 October, 11:00-12:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION

The GO FAIR Foundation (GFF) has been asked by various sectors to provide FAIR certification for FAIR-related resources. This request has come from a broad range of stakeholders and concerns the widely perceived need for independent third-party criteria and validation of resources with respect to the FAIR Principles, for technical components, domain-relevant standards, FAIR-related training, for FAIR implementation events (e.g. M4M and FIP workshops), for people (demonstrating various FAIR-related competencies) and organizations that aspire are committed to FAIR practices. It is believed that certification, when appropriately applied, can be a powerful accelerator of convergence onto wide-spread FAIR implementations. In response, the GFF has initiated a Pioneer Program to bootstrap an approach to certification beginning with a limited number of early mover experts and organizations that have clearly established themselves as global leaders in FAIR implementation. The GFF invites these experts and organizations as “GO FAIR Pioneers” to work together to build the first generation criteria for FAIR certification.

FAIRsFAIR – Tools and Support to foster FAIR Data practices in Europe, Wednesday 27 October, 13:00-14:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION

This 90min practice session will showcase practical solutions for the use of the FAIR data principles throughout the research data life cycle, namely fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of good practices in making data FAIR. The session will have presentations from different FAIRsFAIR tools and support programs to repository managers, research data managers, service providers, data stewards and higher education institutes. Some implementation stories will be showcased of how FAIRsFAIR is supporting the improvement of data FAIRness and interoperability, across disciplines dealing with data. There will be opportunity for interaction and discussion with the audience.

Towards computable publications: Author-driven FAIR data production, Wednesday 27 October, 16:00-17:30 UTC: REGISTER FOR THIS SESSION

Producing FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) data cannot be accomplished solely by data curators in all disciplines. In biology, we have seen that phenotypic data curation is not only costly, but it is burdened with inter-curator variation. Variation in the curation results is stemmed from the complicated intellectual processes of interpreting published scientific findings and re-expressing the findings in machine languages (e.g., ontologies) by different curators. Inter-curator variation is also well-known in other intellectual activities involving human participants, for example: inter-cataloger variation/agreement among library catalogers and inter-coder variation/agreement in content analyses used in social science studies. Since inter-curator variation is inherent in any human-based intellectual activity, this issue should be recognized as one major issue in the post-publication curation approach to produce FAIR data. Data scientists have been investigating an alternative approach to FAIR data production that is grounded on making scientific publications semantically clear (i.e., computable) at the time of publication. So FAIR data can be harvested immediately after publication. We believe authors are the most authoritative in interpreting their datasets, methods, and finding (or “data” collectively) and we need to design intuitive semantic models and software platforms to support authors to efficiently express their data and produce computable publications. The theme of this session is enabling scientific authors to publish FAIR data along with human readable articles. It addresses two conference themes: (1) Policy and Practice of Data in Research, and (2) Data and Education. Younger generation of scientists should learn to write computable publications.

Virtual SciDataCon 2021 is organised by CODATA and the World Data System, the two data organisations of the International Science Council – PROGRAMME AT A GLANCE – FULL PROGRAMME – please note that registration is free, but participants must register for each session they wish to attend.

CODATA and WDS are very grateful to SpringerNature for sponsorship of Virtual SciDataCon 2021. This sponsorship has assisted us in running the conference without a cost-recovery access charge, for which we are extremely grateful.