FAIR & Open – Proper Data Handling at CNRC
Chanel Reed, CNRC Project Coordinator, sat down with Rachel Raider, Data Steward for the CNRC Research Team at NCU, to dive into the role that FAIR principles play in our data management plan.
Q: How would you describe the purpose of your role as “Data Steward” for this project?
A: My role as data steward is to assist our research team in following certain guidelines with the data we collect and publish. There has been a recent push to make research data more open and FAIR, which supports the scientific community by reducing duplication effort. Basically, if a team is funded to conduct a certain study, the data that is collected shouldn’t be private because that will require other researchers to repeat the same process in their study before building upon that knowledge. Some believe that understanding of various phenomena would be able to grow more quickly and easily if researchers make their data open — my job is to optimize our process to ensure that this happens.
Q: What is “Open Science” and why is it important?
A: One purpose of “Open Science” is to allow more streamlined collaboration between researchers. Studies that practice Open Science principles keep anonymized data freely available in a way that allows other researchers to safely and ethically replicate studies, something that is important right now in the face of the replication crisis. Some argue that the more we in the scientific community do to align with Open Science practices, the closer we are to accurately explaining all those things we as researchers seek to understand.
Q: How exactly does “Open Science” help to make data more accessible?
A: Peer-reviewed journals, where studies are traditionally published, usually have expensive subscription fees which limit public access to research. If you’re associated with a school, you can access their resources, but that information isn’t readily available to anyone searching on the internet. Additionally, when a researcher publishes their study, not all of the data they collect will be included in the final draft, leaving portions of their hard work unreported. This causes someone else to spend time designing the same study later to find the comparable results or, worse, to attempt to replicate the study and fail to reproduce similar results at all. When we make our research open, this allows for replication and collaboration, meaning that another team could follow the same process and find the same results or expand on reported findings.
Q: What are the FAIR principles?
A: FAIR is an acronym for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.
Findable means that data should be able to be found by others, both humans and computers. The data should be accessible, meaning that it should be as open as possible, but as closed as necessary — some data is sensitive and should only be available with some form of authentication and authorization. It’s important that data is interoperable by having a clear, consistent format that will allow it to be integrated with new findings. Finally, reusability is the main purpose of these practices — data should be described well enough to be able to be reused by others.
Q: In simple terms, what does that all mean?
A: The ultimate goal is to make data easy to obtain and reuse in future research. FAIR principles are guidelines we can follow to ensure that our results are available and understandable to other researchers who want to use the data we collect in their own studies, thus aiding in duplication and replication efforts.
Q: What is the CNRC Team doing to ensure we follow FAIR principles?
A: We are keeping the FAIR principles in mind from start to finish which will ensure that we are carefully documenting our methods and including rich metadata to support other researchers in using our findings in future studies. Since these guidelines are becoming more mainstream, we are fortunate to have a variety of online resources we can use to assist us in this endeavor. It’s a lot of hard work (not to mention time and money) to create an experiment from scratch, so we will be reducing the amount of effort required in the future by making research as open as possible by adopting the FAIR principles. Our hope is that the research we conduct will inspire and contribute to further exploration in the field!
