In October 2018 the first Metadata for Machines (M4M) Workshop took place, which assesses the state of metadata practices in data-related communities and stimulates the creation and re-use of FAIR metadata standards and machine-ready metadata templates.

In this M4M workshop the paper “The FAIR Funder pilot programme to make it easy for funders to require and for grantees to produce FAIR data” had been conceived. It has now been published as a pre-print and is available at https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.11162v2.

This paper describes the outcomes of this workshop that has led to the FAIR Funder pilot programme. The programme involves two national science funders, the Health Research Board of Ireland and the Netherlands Organisation for Health Research and Development, which will explore new technologies to define the minimal set of machine-actionable metadata in proposals.