Democratising FAIRness by adding metadata to a storage platform researchers love to use

This talk discusses a democratised approach to FAIRness as being built for the CS3MESH4EOSC project.

The principles of FAIR have been widely embraced. Uptake of FAIRnes remains a challenge. We recognise two main obstacles:

1. FAIR-aware infrastructure needs to be available, and be so usable that it gets broad uptake
2. Research communities need to be motivated, trained and assisted to use this FAIR infrastructure. It needs to make their lives easier. Without relevant infrastructure in place, there is no point in mounting FAIRnes awareness campaigns.

The CS3MESH4EOSC approach to FAIR uptake is to start from the Science Mesh of datastores, already in widespread use by researchers. We add a FAIR Description Service to these stores, for any researcher to use (an instance of the "Describo" tool). Thus they can create FAIR Digital Object packages from their own data (using the RO-Crate standard); initially targeting the open access Zenodo repository service.

CS3mesh4EOSC meshes datastores that are already in widespread use by researchers. By adding metatada awareness and annotation capabilities to this already-patronised mesh, we end up with a democratised approach to FAIR. Allowing researchers to generate FAIR objects from their live data (no onerous upload / collections steps) will help create more FAIR data supply. We are glad to work with other EOSC entities, either offering this as a whitelabel to other service providers, or directly to end users.