Draft recommendations for FAIR Photon and Neutron Data Management

ExPaNDS WP2 has the objective of Enabling FAIR Data, providing guidelines, recommendation and practical experience to the project and the wider PaN community on the best practise in generating FAIR experimental data for National RIs. In order for the facility to deliver experimental data “FAIR at the point of leaving the facility”, the infrastructure systems and procedures involved in the facilities experimental lifecycle should be coordinated to construct and maintain the FAIRness of that data. In particular, at each stage in the experimental lifecycle, metadata and contextual information should be collected (automatically and manually) to form as complete a record as possible of the experiment so that that data can be FAIR.

In this report, we give an analysis of the metadata that should be generated and recorded at each stage of the lifecycle and consider its contribution to making that data FAIR. This delivers a prioritization which we use to determine which metadata should be collected. We use that prioritization to make a series of recommendations on the types of metadata that should be collected at each stage. These recommendations give a framework for setting standards for common metadata formats and provide a basis for assessing the FAIRness of data generated by facilities. Further work will develop these draft recommendations into our final recommendations for common metadata formats and use of metadata in practice.