Reducing abundance, avoiding duplication of efforts and promoting harmonisation and reuse of results are among the difficult tasks that European funded projects, and the European agencies that fund and overlook these efforts, tackle. This is so even (or even more) when the need is to bring order within the practices that institutes and research centres implement to respond to the FAIR principles, which is a lively, widespread bottom-up cross-disciplinary effort. FAIR enabling practices, methodologies, guidelines and tools are being introduced and shared among research communities, but the sharing, discoverability, and reuse of research data and products necessitate continued enhanced community cooperation.
Since 2019 Trust-IT is supporting one of these terrific synchronisation efforts to maximise collaboration, minimise duplication, and promote adherence to the FAIR principles.
Three workshops were organised between 2019 and 2021 in the framework of the FAIRsFAIR project bringing together representatives of INFRAEOSC-5 projects, ESFRI clusters and e-infrastructure projects, the EOSC Association Directors, FAIR Champions and experts as well as project officers of the European Commission, to share information on their FAIR-oriented activities and to discuss commonalities and priorities. Due to the COVID pandemic, this was done fully remotely, with a programme diluted along 5 online 90 minute sessions distributed along a period of 3 to 4 weeks. This turned out to be very well received by participants who were involved in relatively short interactive sessions, had time to rest in between one and the other and even share the workload with colleagues, and get prepared for each of the upcoming sessions.
Built on the successful first Synchronisation Force series, the FAIR-IMPACT project (2022-2025) is taking over this legacy and continues maintaining a dialogue for collaboration and harmonisation with various projects, initiatives, and actors in both EOSC and FAIR ecosystems. Three online synchronisation workshops are being organised, two of them took place already in 2022 and 2023. The third and last one is scheduled from Tuesday 3rd of September to Thursday 7th of November 2024, as a series of 8 online sessions. Each workshop results in a report and collectively they will form the basis of a white paper, providing recommendations for alignment and synchronisation around FAIR practices.
The objective of the 2024 workshop remains the same: discuss common challenges and priorities related to turning the FAIR principles into practice, to then release recommendations to help researchers, data practictioners, scientists as well as decision makers at repository and e-infrastructure level in being more compliant with the FAIR principles for data management.
The Synchronisation Force is chaired by DANS, FAIR-IMPACT coordinator, and Trust-IT, Outreach and dissemination manager. Invited to the workshop are selected, key FAIR representatives of projects and initiatives in the EOSC framework.
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