As a member of the FAIRplus project, The Hyve aims to promote and support the discovery, accessibility and reusability of data from selected Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) projects as well as data from pharmaceutical industry partners. The FAIRplus project is funded by IMI, a collaboration of 21 partners from academia and industry. It also receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and several EFPIA companies.
The challenge
Over the past years, the Hyve has been actively involved with the development and implementation of FAIR data principles. Many companies, research institutes and consortia agree that these principles are important. However, when it comes to implementing them, they struggle to put the principles into practice. Where to start when making research data FAIR? It’s a process that gets complicated very quickly and it’s easy to end up in a situation where you can’t see the forest for the trees.
How FAIRplus is solving it
The FAIRplus project aims to facilitate implementation of the FAIR principles by developing practical guidelines and tools for making data FAIR. In the future, it will also organise training for data scientists in academia, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and pharmaceutical companies to promote a wider adoption of best practises in life science data management.
One of the goals of the project is to FAIRify at least twenty existing research datasets of IMI projects before/by the end of the FAIRplus project (June 2023). Based on the experience gained with tackling the IMI-data, the FAIRplus team/partners are developing a process description and guidelines on how to FAIRify data. The guidelines are translated into “recipes” and published in a FAIR Cookbook. This Cookbook is one of the major deliverables of FAIRplus and aims to provide scientists and organizations with practical, step-by-step advice on how to make their own datasets more FAIR. The Cookbook will be shared publicly; an early version is already available here.
Besides the Cookbook, a FAIRplus Maturity Model is being developed. This will include FAIR indicators to assess the level of FAIRness of a digital object - a database, catalogue, etc. Furthermore, FAIRplus is planning to run a comprehensive training programme in FAIR data management for researchers, data scientists and IT experts working with life science data.
The Hyve’s involvement
Within the IMI consortium, The Hyve has a coordinating role in one of the task forces and is actively involved with the FAIRification of IMI datasets, the description of the FAIRification process, and the development of the FAIR Cookbook recipes.
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