The FAIR principles behind the Cookbook
The FAIR principles, which ensure data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable with minimal human intervention, have de facto become a global norm for good data stewardship and a prerequisite for reproducibility in the public and private sectors.
To address the need for specific and practical guidance that helps users make and keep data FAIR in the life sciences, data managers and professionals from ELIXIR and pharma have built an online resource named the FAIR Cookbook.
The resource guides researchers and data stewards in their FAIRification journey, providing hands-on and technical step-by-step examples to follow, and provides policymakers and trainers with practical examples to recommend in their guidance and use in their educational material.
FAIR Cookbooks’ offer
The FAIR Cookbook’s content (“recipes”) is organised by FAIR elements, audience type, reading time, and difficulty level. Recipes help users to learn: how to FAIRify datasets, the levels and indicators of FAIRness, the maturity model, the technologies, the tools and the standards available, as well as the skills required, and the challenges, to achieve and improve FAIRness.
Recipes are also progressively cross-referenced to other relevant ELIXIR resources in the FAIR ecosystem, such as FAIRsharing (for standards), WorkflowHub (for workflows), as well as the RDMkit (for the research data management cycle), as well as the Pistoia Alliance’s FAIR Toolkit.
Watch the webinar to ELIXIR FAIR Cookbook webinar that attracted over 400 registrants.
The contributors behind the resource
The content is community-contributed and goes through a rigorous editorial process. The content of the FAIR Cookbook is FAIR itself: content is discoverable in search indexes (via Sitemap.xml and JSON-LD; markup of the recipes with Schema.org and Bioschemas); recipes are citable via w3id.org unique persistent identifiers and are a credit to authors via ORCID, and attribution is given via CreDiT ontology. All content has a CC BY 4.0 license. The resource is built on open source community practices, using jupyter-book, following the practice used by The Alan Turing Institute’s “The Turing Way Book” and Github as the underlying technical infrastructure.
The FAIR Cookbook is already a core, named element in the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform, and recommended by the Guidance of the (IMI), and now also by its successor programme, the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI).
We welcome contributions! If you want to participate, join and learn how to contribute or contact us at [email protected].
