The FAIR Island Project
Optimizing policies and robust technical infrastructure to enable FAIR data for field stations
Open Science for Research Data
The FAIR Island Project provides an unparalleled opportunity in a unique, controlled environment where research is coordinated through the Tetiaroa Society 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.
The FAIR Island Project values Open Science and open sharing of research data and products associated with research on Tetiaroa. All researchers working on Tetiaroa, resident or visiting, are required to create data management plans (DMPs) for their proposed projects to study the island and said DMPs are updated as data collection advances.
In collaboration with researchers, the 4Site Data Management Community, iSamples and many others, this project will build a model research data management system feeding data across stakeholders, linking metadata, repositories and institutions, and allowing for notifications and verification, reporting in real-time, automated compliance, and guaranteed provenance.
Harnessing the opportunities presented when researchers comply with the Tetiaroa Society Data policy, the FAIR Island project provides 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.
