Co-Creation survey to produce report on how FAIR data impacts researchers careers
The EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) aims to create a European open science community and is supported by the governance structures of the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) Secretariat, along with its Working Groups (WGs).
One of the key concepts of open science is based on a set of sharing principles published in 2016 known as FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability). It stems from the idea of enhancing the reusability of research data and does this by enabling machines to automatically find and use the data, supporting its reuse by individuals. These principles garnered much interest and now are used by national and international funding bodies who ask researchers to make all their data FAIR as one of their funding conditions. This set of best practice principles has extended to the EOSC where FAIR is to be at the core.
The EOSC FAIR Working Group is tasked with providing recommendations on the implementation of open and FAIR practices. This WG builds on existing FAIR practices in all disciplines and addresses interoperability across them. It proposes measures for increasing FAIR maturity to maximise data sharing and re-use. At the recent EOSC Consultation Day, the WG presented an update on its work, including the future governance framework of EOSC rules with an emphasis on participation from stakeholders.
To this end, an EOSC Secretariat-funded study from the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies entitled ‘European overview of merit and incentive systems in relation to FAIR data creation’ aims to support the widespread cultural and practical changes required to realise EOSC by building an overview of European policy and guidelines on the rewards and incentives.
Rewards and incentives for research data sharing are a vital part of the stimulation necessary to realise the EOSC vision. The results from this survey will be collated and analysed for commonalities, and the analysis will also identify gaps and challenges and will provide a benchmarking tool for organisations.
The team at the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies aim to do this by complementing existing studies with a more detailed examination of identified and existing policies for different research contexts: research performing organisations (RPO) and research funding organisations (RFO), international, national and organisational guidelines, policies and roadmaps for including data in researcher and research evaluation. On top of this, the study will research RPO’s and RFO’s to gain an overview of information systems and data models for collecting and sharing career merit information, including research data, at the international, national and institutional levels.
