The FAIR-DI-FAIRmat Colloquium on
How to materialise FAIR
Barend Mons, Leiden University Medical Center
took place on October 7, 2021.
Barend Mons is the Scientific Director of the GO FAIR Foundation, President of CODATA, and key person behind the renowned paper “The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship”.
Barend Mons will share with us the experiences of the early implementation phase of the FAIR guiding principles. He will give a brief historical perspective, a bit of background on how FAIR became a hype term (> 5000 citations on the 2016 article already) and how that also distracted FAIR from its core at some places. Then he will zoom in on lessons learned, and how to make FAIR ‘materialise’. Major lessons on how important it is to make implementation choices explicit, and FAIR themselves, so that machines c an understand your choices, how to systematically deal with that, and how to ensure that whatever you produce (metadata or data) is composed of FAIR Digital Object (Machine actionable units of information). Finally he will make a plea for proper and well budgeted data stewardship plans, compliant with the FAIR guiding principles for each and every research project we may contemplate (yes, when we contemplate, not in hindsight). So this will set the stage for many discussions in many sessions.