Guidelines for Raising FAIR Adoption in Health Data and Health-related Research Performing Organisations (HRPOs)

Adoption and application of the FAIR principles to research data has grown significantly in the few years that they have existed. They have been embraced in many quarters and have paved the way to creating a level playing field for data reuse. Nevertheless, they also pose challenges in some areas of research where reuse may not be an automatic right due to issues of confidentiality, privacy, commercial interests and sensitivities in general.

One sector of research where this is particularly evident is health research, and this proposed working group aims to address global disparities in uptake of the FAIR principles in health research and within health research performing organisations (HRPOs). The work will build upon existing and ongoing work being conducted at the European level (please see below the attached document "D2.3 Guidelines for implementing FAIR open data policy in health research"), and which has in itself identified differences in policies within that region. The aim will be to expand on this work to create a global analysis of policies and to subsequently draw on commonalities to propose a set of guidelines (RDA outputs or recommendations) that can be utilised by HRPOs in their local contexts to address FAIRification of their research data.