Conference Agenda

We present the full cycle of setting up research infrastructures: from strategy to implementation, and how to systematically assess (new) infrastructures using impact analysis.

The European Commission strives for a single market for research data. Within its Open Science policy there are two strategic pillars dealing with this objective: the European Open Science Cloud and the FAIR data principles.

There have been multiple initiatives to realize a ‘web of research data’ and remove barriers, and we will focus on some salient projects from the Horizon program.

Next, we will incorporate these actions into an Impact Analysis to assess the medium- and long-term impacts. This will cover the full policy cycle of setting up data services and provide a tool for policy makers, research infrastructures and research communities.

The FAIR data principles are rapidly becoming a standard through which to assess responsible and reproducible research. The Accessibility criteria, often thought to be the most straightforward of the principles, are focussed on whether data and metadata can be accessed electronically (as opposed to accessibility in terms of physical disability). However, this perception is predicated on the assumption that data and metadata is deposited in a trustworthy digital repository and access to the repository is of the same quality regardless of who accesses it.

We present the findings of a pilot study that demonstrates that this implicit assumption is not necessarily a valid one. In particular this assumption may not hold when connectivity is poor (as occurs for researchers from Low and Middle Income Counties) or connectivity is blocked for specific users on the basis of the country that they reside in (referred to as geo-blocking).

This paper presents the findings of a pilot study that clearly indicated that access to FAIR data resources is influenced by a range of geo-political factors. The paper will also outline what would be the next steps for the FAIR community to safeguard access to Open resources to researchers around the world.

Databases are one of the most important resources for researchers in data-driven domains. In many organizations, it is yet still a challenge to make databases available from the beginning of a project and databases are maintained by some IT-savvy researcher who has the burden to do these tasks on-top of (or rather before being able to do) research. We present a repository for relational databases in a private cloud-based setting that: i) enables research early by providing databases on demand for researchers; ii) enables separation of concerns into researchers who work with the data, data providers who feed data into databases, IT-professionals who maintain the databases and the infrastructure and data stewards who curate data in databases; iii) allows assignment of semantic information of the table schema, by storing concepts from the Wikidata knowledge graph and units from the Ontology of Units of Measure; and iv) allows precise and persistent identification databases and arbitrary subsets.