12.2 Essentials 4 Data Support : A Fine Course in FAIR Data Support

This paper will examine how FAIR principles are integrated in a course for those involved in research data support, without naming them FAIR principles. The course in question is Essentials 4 Data Support which combines face-to face and online training.

Realising the European Open Science Cloud’ (the 2016 report from the Commission’s High Level Expert Group) stated the following: “The number of people [needing data] skills to effectively operate the EOSC is, we estimate, likely exceeding half a million within a decade”.

And in the same report: “well budgeted data stewardship plans should be made mandatory and we expect that on average about 5% of research expenditure should be spent on properly managing and stewarding data”.

These goals are highly ambitious. To meet these challenges a number of practical and well evaluated courses have been developed in the last years. An example of such a course is Essentials 4 Data Support, designed and developed by Research Data Netherlands (RDNL). This paper presents the FAIR principles and how the elements of these principles are incorporated in the course. For example: in the module on Data Documentation we focus on the metadata and what rich metadata means; in the module Citing Data and Data Impact, Persistent Identifiers are explained.

The authors will show that Essentials 4 Data Support is a FAIR course avant la lettre, teaching the FAIR principles before they were announced as such.