Unlocking Knowledge: Exploring Open Research Infrastructure and FAIR Principles

A robust and resilient research infrastructure – one that supports the tools, services, and systems that researchers rely on – is essential to ensuring that the research process is as efficient and effective as possible. Open infrastructure means it is open for the research community to use, contribute to, participate in, and benefit from. They are usually available globally but often unevenly adopted. It is down to the Open infrastructure organizations, typically communally supported nonprofit organizations, to maintain the technologies and drive adoption. 

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) and the metadata associated with them are considered the building blocks of open research infrastructure. Through standardized and interoperable metadata schema and prevalent implementation across research performing and publishing organizations, PIDs facilitate seamless exchange of information in the scholarly ecosystem to supplement discovery, reuse, and reporting workflows of researchers, institutions, and funders.

In this course we will introduce and discuss how PIDs and metadata can help make research more open on a global scale. We will share progress and challenges of DataCite DOI infrastructure adoption, discuss the FAIR principles and how implementing PIDs and metadata workflows in the research process will make the research FAIR.

In this course we will discuss:

• Why is it important that infrastructure is open and what does that openness look like?

• What options do you have to use open infrastructure as part of your daily activities?

• What is metadata and why is it important for establishing evidence and provenance?

• How can you create and use metadata to make connections?

• How can you increase visibility and trust through the use of persistent identifiers and metadata?

• How to make your research process FAIRer?