The FAIR Island
Real-world examples of FAIR and CARE at field stations
The relationship between people, place, and data underpins some of the greatest challenges, and opportunities, of the 21st century. Relationships between human communities and their natural and built environments are increasingly mediated through digital data. In addition, there has been general enthusiasm for, and work towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data for Open Science.
The FAIR Island Project translates FAIR Data Principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016) and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al., 2020) into practice for scientific field stations through the development of place-based data policies and critical research infrastructure centered on machine-actionable data management plans.
About the Project
Using working field stations that are linked to a range of international research networks in marine and terrestrial environments, the Project builds interoperability between pieces of critical research infrastructure
Place-based Data Policy
Building on experience with the Tetiaroa Ecostation, we have developed a generic place-based data policy for reuse and modification at other sites.
Creating Connections with Persistent Identifiers
The FAIR Island Project leverages persistent identifers including RORs for ogranizations, ORCiDS for peoples and DOIs for scholarly outputs, pre-registration and DMPs to link field station research back to the place.
Integrate with Existing Infrastructure
Integration with other systems is a core requirement and scalable benefit of the Project. These PID connections facilitate further development of the DataCite Commons interface as a field station dashboard. Additional social network analysis is also possible.
Participating Field Stations
The FAIR Island Project started as a partnership between the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of California, Berkeley, Gump South Pacific Research Station and the Tetiaroa Society’s Ecostation.
Here are some of our recent activities. Find all of our published outputs in our Zenodo community.
*New Publication* FAIR Island: real-world examples of place-based open science
Generic Place-based Data Policy V1.0.2
Official 1st release of the template Place-based Data Policy. The Generic Place-based data policy is a template derived from the draft Tetiaroa Ecostation Data Policy and meant to be an example for other field stations, marine labs and research stations that may want to use it.
There are lots of ways to support the FAIR Island Project. We are looking to integrate with existing infrastructure projects to show the power of reuse. We love working with students to provide a real-world project to learn from. We are also actively looking to expand the field sites that we work with. If any of this sounds interesting, please connect!