September 24, 2020
Carole Goble is giving a keynote talk about “Faring with FAIR” at the GMDS Workshop “FAIRe Data Infrastructures” on Thursday, October 15th, 2020.
Abstract of the talk:
Remarkably it was only in 2016 that the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’ appeared in Scientific Data. The paper was intended to launch a dialogue within the research and policy communities: to start a journey to wider accessibility and reusability of data and prepare for automation-readiness by supporting findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability for machines. Many of the authors (including myself) came from biomedical and associated communities. The paper succeeded in its aim, at least at the policy, enterprise and professional data infrastructure level. Whether FAIR has impacted the researcher at the bench or bedside is open to doubt. It certainly inspired a great deal of activity, many projects, a lot of positioning of interests and infrastructure initiatives such as FAIRDOM. COVID has injected impetus and urgency to the FAIR cause (good), highlighted its politicisation (not so good) and the need to reassure communities that FAIR for health related data is not a contradiction with data privacy. In this talk I’ll reflect on how we are faring with FAIR: as one of the original authors; as a FAIR infrastructure developer for the biomedical sector and as a veteran of FAIR before we had the principles.