FAIRiness

Adequate data management is imperative to ensure that the FAIR principles apply, i.e. that data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable. However, the diversity of the Lasers4EU installations make the implementation of a common data management plan (DMP) quite challenging.

The objective of FAIRiness is thus to help the Lasers4EU partners in completing, individually, the transition to FAIR access data management by providing concrete support.

Under coordination of EPFL, each Lasers4EU access-providing facility will appoint a representative, if possible a researcher accustomed to access rather than a computer scientist, in order to build a FAIR network.

The duty of this network will be to
(i) gather DMPs and access policies, already in place at Lasers4EU partners or provided by funding agencies, and
(ii) analyze them in order to identify common features, relevant for access experiments and indispensable to ensure easy data accessibility and portability for the multi-instrument access route.

These features will constitute the key ingredients to draft a Lasers4EU access DMP template, which will be confronted with access reality through its use for the curiosity-driven joint experiments, and refined if necessary.

A FAIR help desk will thereafter be established. It will help the access providers to adapt the above-mentioned template to their specific user experiments and provide recommendations on the available and most suitable metadata formats. This strategy, as well as the collection of the individual DMPs, will constitute the first Lasers4EU data management plan and be regularly updated during the course of the project; its final version will include the access DMP template.