The FAIR Island Project
Optimizing policies to enable FAIR data
Open Science for Research Data
Imagine a dream island – Utopia – where all data are FAIR. On Utopia, all research is coordinated through an institution with an optimal data policy for open access, mandatory registration requirements for all research projects, and data management plans containing controlled vocabularies and identifiers implementing global standards wherever possible. All Researchers on Utopia, resident or visiting, are required and incentivized to create data management plans (DMPs) for their proposed projects to study the island and said DMPs are updated as data collection advances. Harnessing the opportunities presented in such a FAIR data utopia, could we build a model research data management system that allows data to be fed across stakeholders, linking metadata, repositories and institutions, and allowing for notifications and verification, reporting in real-time, automated compliance, and guaranteed provenance? The FAIR Island project envisions such a Utopia working with real-world case studies that leverages existing and ongoing work making DMPs machine-actionable (for example, California Digital LIbrary’s NSF funded EAGER grant).
Tetiaroa Atoll
Building on the Island Digital Ecosystem Avatars (IDEA) Consortium (see Davies et al. 2016), the FAIR Island’s ‘Tetiaroa Project’ leverages collaboration between the University of California Gump Station, located on Moorea in French Polynesia, and Tetiaroa Society, a non-profit organization that operates a newly established field station located on the atoll of Tetiaroa, a short distance from Moorea and Tahiti. Tetiaroa Society is the atoll’s environmental steward and hosts a diverse community of visiting scientists carrying out basic and applied research guided by its international Scientific Advisory Board.
