In November 2023, we, Kristina Hettne from the Leiden University Libraries' Centre for Digital Scholarship and Alessa Gambardella from the Faculty of Science at Leiden University, embarked on our GO FAIR Foundation (GFF) Fellowship, lasting until May 2025. The motivation behind the fellowship was three-fold:

• To be qualified GFF Three-Point FAIRification Framework (3PFF) facilitators with state-of-the-art skills in implementing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data, to be put into action at Leiden in the form of new training workshops and contribution to ongoing projects on FAIR data.

• To establish connections with recent developments and therefore initiate involvement in new FAIR data projects at Leiden University or elsewhere, fueling the expertise of FAIR data at Leiden University.

• To enable access to the GFF Fellows knowledge network with pooled expertise on FAIR data.

Training on FAIR data implementation

In January 2025, we completed our certifications as qualified 3PFF facilitators. In short, 3PFF is a way to train the academic community to make data FAIR. The framework has three key points: FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP), Machine Actionable Metadata, and FAIR Orchestration.

A FIP is a published list of technological choices a community makes to implement the FAIR principles. For example, what type of technology is used to make data more findable? An answer could be the use of persistent identifiers.

Machine Actionable Metadata means that the metadata can be found, accessed, and used by a computer system without human intervention. Metadata must be structured in a specific way, for example in a format like JSON-LD, using domain-specific vocabularies.

FAIR Orchestration concerns the infrastructure used to realize the choices in the FAIR Implementation Profile. For example, data sharing via repositories or as Linked Open Data (LOD).

As facilitators of the 3PFF, we can lead workshops on FIPs, M4M and FAIR Orchestration and thus further the implementation of the FAIR principles in Leiden. During our fellowship, we assisted in 3PFF workshops given by the GFF, and at Leiden University we have established a workshop on FAIR Implementation Profiles for research communities that we provide to the research community two times a year. The training on FAIR data implementation that we received also inspired us to create more workshops around FAIR data tailored to researchers and research support staff that we now give yearly.

Projects on FAIR data implementation

LEIbits

LEIbits is a tool for pointing to Leiden research data and publishing research claims related to the data. The creation of the tool was motivated by the need for Leiden University to track where researchers deposit their data. We tried to also make it interesting (and maybe even fun!) for researchers as a new way of pointing to and publishing research results as FAIR and Linked Open Data on a distributed network of servers based on an open source tool called Nanodash. We are now working with stakeholders and piloting the tool with researchers. LEIbits is available here and we prepared a Zenodo submission with a presentation and a user guide.

FAIR Implementation Profiles

As mentioned above, a FIP is a published list of technological choices a community makes to implement the FAIR principles. During our fellowship, we created a FIP for the Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections together with a team at the library, and a FIP for the Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN) in RSpace used at Leiden University together with a team from Research Space. The FIP for the Leiden University Libraries Digital Collections helps the library to think about how to implement the FAIR principles and expose their collections as data, while the FIP for the ELN in RSpace helps Research Space to implement the FAIR principles for data flowing through their tooling and to further their efforts in data interoperability. In addition, the latter FIP gives Leiden University an idea on how FAIR their ELN tooling is. There is an increasing demand to know how FAIR data is within Leiden research data tooling, and at the start of the fellowship, we also assessed the FAIRness of the Yoda platform within the context of the FAIR Yoda for Communities project.

Another development around FIPs is to connect FIPs to data management plans (DMPs), to facilitate filling out the parts of the DMP that concern the implementation of the FAIR principles, such as the choice of a metadata standard. Earlier work focused on connecting FIPs and DMPs in a technical way within the framework of the Data Stewardship Wizard Platform. Within the fellowship, we wanted to explore how to generalize this connection: we worked with the PARC project to use the RDA Common Standard for maDMPs and logically connect FIPs to DMPs in the FAIR Wizard platform. This work will be continued in the OSTrails project, a national pilot where we explore how to connect the FIP technology to other DMP platforms.

A network of FAIR data expertise

As GFF Fellows we were, and still are, part of a FAIR data expertise network driving different developments on FAIR data. We are part of the FIP core team taking decisions on the further development of FIPs and part of the team that curates metadata about FAIR resources connected to FIPs. The activities within the network continue to serve as an inspiration for implementation of the FAIR principles at Leiden University. A new project originating from the network is FAIR AI Attribution (FAIA), where we contribute to the development of an open, FAIR, and structured framework to verifiably disclose the role of artificial intelligence in content creation.

We have gained a lot of knowledge and expertise on FAIR data during our fellowship that we have been able to put into practice in training development and projects at Leiden University. In the future, we aim to develop more training related to FAIR data and we will continue the developments in projects focusing on making Leiden University data more FAIR.

This blog was copyedited by Tessa de Roo and Pascal Flohr

Banner photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash