Six Recommendations for Implementation of FAIR Practice

The report analyses the state of FAIR practices within diverse research communities and FAIR-related policies in different countries, and offers six practical recommendations on how FAIR can be turned into practice. These recommendations are aimed primarily at decision making entities of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as well as research funders:

1. Fund awareness-raising, training, education and community-specific support.
2. Fund development, adoption and maintenance of community standards, tools and infrastructure.
3. Incentivise development of community governance.
4. Translate FAIR guidelines for other digital objects.
5. Reward and recognise improvements of FAIR practice.
6. Develop and monitor adequate policies for FAIR data and research objects.

In order to ensure widespread benefits of the EOSC, improvements in FAIR practices are necessary. We believe that the timing of this report, which coincides with the fully-fledged launch of the EOSC, could help the EOSC, research funders and policymakers make crucial strategic decisions about the investment needed to put FAIR principles into practice.

This report has been written by the FAIR Practice Task Force of the European Open Science Cloud Executive Board FAIR Working Group. This report can be seen as a follow-up on the 2018 report “Turning FAIR into reality” from the European Commission Expert Group on FAIR Data. Our primary aim was to translate our findings into actionable recommendations to the decision making entities of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as well as research funders and policymakers on how to turn FAIR into practice. In
addition, this work should be seen as complementary to “Recommendations on practice to support FAIR data principles” by the FAIRsFAIR project, which makes specific recommendations aimed primarily at research communities and research support personnel (including data stewards and research software engineers).

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The final version of this report, in official European Commission template, is available at: https://doi.org/10.2777/986252