Data FAIRification in a cross-institutional governance framework : recommendations from the ANR-BRIDGE project

Abstract

Open science is a priority for the European Commission, fostering research data management policies and infrastructures. In France, the Second National Plan for Open Science aims to ensure that open science becomes a common and shared practice, encouraged by the entire international ecosystem of higher education, research, and innovation.

One challenge is that French research is mainly organized into joint research units: within a same laboratory, project or publication datasets can be managed by different research organizations, necessitating choosing between several institutional and disciplinary data repositories that can cause data scattering.

In addition to these repositories, the French Ministry of Research is building a national federated data repository: Recherche Data Gouv, as part of its Open Science Plan.

In this context, three French research organizations, each maintaining an institutional data repository based on Dataverse software, initiated the BRIDGE project funded by the French National Research Agency following a special Open Science call.

The goal is to provide guidelines and harmonize research data policies and repository management in a reusable approach for other institutes or contexts, focusing on three priorities:

1. Analyzing and improving institutional data governance policies
2. Providing and endorsing common guidelines for data producers and managers
3. Choosing FAIR vocabularies and developing IT tools to improve FAIRness of repositories with some shared metadata schemas

This poster showcases the main outputs of the project, including (1) recommendations based on the Research Data Policy Framework of the RDA Data policy Interest Group, (2) evaluation and recommendation for datasets leveraging the RDA SHARC Interest Group grid, and (3) proof-of-concept to harmonize harvested metadata between repositories.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR) for supporting BRIDGE project ANR-19-DATA-0013