Supporting FAIR and Forever: experiences in revising the Energy Data Centre's policies

The Energy Data Centre, EDC  (www.ukerc.rl.ac.uk) is part of the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC). UKERC carries out inter-disciplinary research into sustainable energy futures. The EDC curates UK energy research data, provides a discovery portal and expert advice on data management planning to UKERC researchers.   

In 2020, the authors joined the EDC and made explicit the implicit policy in place. They created formal collection management, collection cataloguing and preservation policies.  As part of the process, they undertook a Digital Preservation Coalition’s Rapid Assessment Model (RAM) review and created a development plan.  These activities were focused on the preservation aspects of the service and applied mainly to internal processes.  

In January 2024, the EDC was accepted onto the FAIR-IMPACT repository support programme which aims to help repositories support the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable principles.  As part of the EDC’s action plan, policies and practices were reviewed with a FAIR perspective.  

This poster will discuss these two approaches, their synergies and differences in supporting the creation of polices & procedures with FAIR principles or preservation in mind and how these two approaches have led to a better service. 

For the EDC, being able to preserve the collection for the long-term so that it is usable in the future and ensuring that the datasets within the collection are FAIR are equal priorities and using these approaches to focus on different aspects has improved the service.