An Examination of the Application of FAIR Data Principles to Institutional Research Management Data

Abstract

Defined by Wilkinson, M D, et al. 2016 in “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data mmanagement and stewardship” the FAIR data principles propose a framework to enable the findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability of scholarly data. But are there lessons which could be learned from this and applied to data arising from institutional research administrative processes?

Institutional data suffers from the same sorts of problems the FAIR principles were designed to overcome. In a large institution it can be difficult to know what data exists and how to locate it, difficult to access it and have it in a form which means it can
interact with other data without needing a great deal of manual intervention, which leads to barriers when wanting to reuse it.

This lightning talk examines some of the issues we might experience when applying FAIR data principles to institutional data, with an emphasis on research management data, who’s currently applying these principles and what we may need to do to adopt them within the University of Edinburgh.