Editorial
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Dear GO FAIR community,
The global grand challenges of our age – including climate change mitigation, sustainable development, disaster risk reduction, response to infectious disease pandemics, resilience in cities and other complex human environments – all depend on the ability to combine, analyse, and visualise data from heterogeneous sources created in different knowledge domains. To achieve widespread FAIR data and associated services needed to meet these grand challenges, diverse stakeholders must choose their FAIR implementations wisely. This process of informed and coordinated decision-making is convergence, and is the theme of the International FAIR Convergence Symposium 2020 (27 November – 04 December 2020) that we are co-hosting with CODATA.
We are looking forward to soon coming together with researchers, scientists, data stewards and curators, infrastructure service providers and many more from all over the world to advance cross-domain convergence around FAIR. We have received many interesting session proposals, which were thoroughly reviewed, and we are eager to share the programme with you: https://conference.codata.org/FAIRconvergence2020/programme/ Registration is open until Monday, 16 November 2020: https://conference.codata.org/conference/FAIRconvergence2020/registration/
In preparation of this FAIR convergence symposium GO FAIR is organizing pre-symposium workshops led by Erik Schultes with a focus on FAIR Implementation Profiles and convergence for different research communities. On 19 November participants of all workshops will reconvene to propose convergence strategies which will be reported during our FAIR Symposium. Read a short report about these workshops on our website.
All the best,
Laurent Crouzet, Barend Mons & Klaus Tochtermann
Strategic Directors, GO FAIR Initiative
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Did you know… GO Read
In this section you will learn about Implementation Networks that have recently acquired “active” status, recent IN activities and opportunities. This way, we ensure that you always stay on top of things happening in the “GO FAIR” family.
Reports from internal events
- Read the report about the workshop on Publications on FAIRsemantics for non-experts organised by GO Inter on 1-2 July 2020.
- The US GO FAIR office reports: Next steps for the FAIR data & software lesson.
- The GO UNI IN was successfully kicked-off in Germany on 8 October 2020.
- Did you know that the national GO FAIR Brazil Health Nursing Network was launched on 22 September 2020? Learn more about it on our website.
Outputs
- Check out our news item: First data-visiting of data safely held in FAIR Data points.
- BiodiFAIRse IN co-coordinator Yvan Le Bras organised a three-days event about best practices to develop software in a FAIR way in ecology related scientific domains. He reports: While the first day included introductory training sessions, the following two days a collaboration fest was organised. One group of people used the Wizard and Nanobench to create two new FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs): the first one related to the OSUR community (Earth Sciences and Astronomy Observatory: OSU Rennes, France), and the second one for the French Infrastructure for Analysis and Experimentation on Ecosystems (AnaEE). This work allows BiodiFAIRse communities to now propose 4 FIPs, but more importantly better analyse their information systems and also ask questions to improve their FAIRness. A complete win-win work!
- Read this report by Mirjam van Reisen (IN Coordinator of IN-Africa and Ambassadors IN) & Francisca Oladip, both members of the VODAN IN: Proof of Concept developed by VODAN Africa and Asia.
- The Polish Chapter of the Data Stewardship Competence Centers Implementation Network (DSCC IN) organized a 1-week Data Stewardship School as a way to kick-start a Polish Data Stewards Community.
- Blair Johnston, co-coordinator of the AdvancedNano IN reports: AdvancedNano IN Driving Forward a FAIR-compliant Repository for Data & Tools for Nano & Advanced Material Safety.
Opportunities
- International FAIR Convergence Symposium (27 November – 04 December 2020, virtual): Register here to participate. The deadline is 16 November 2020.
- Data Intelligence is launching a Special Issue on the international FAIR data network for COVID data. Please send Prof Sakinat Oluwabukonla Folorunso an email, if you would like to contribute to this issue.
Interesting reads from the INs
- Check out this paper on “A Semi-Automated Workflow for FAIR Maturity Indicators in the Life Sciences” co-authored by Egon Willighagen, one of the Chemistry IN representatives.
- Read the paper “Coming to Terms with FAIR Ontologies” authored by María Poveda-Villalón, Daniel Garijo, Oscar Corcho (representatives of GO INTER), and Paola Espinoza-Arias, that was published and presented at the 22nd International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management.
- Don’t miss: Six Recommendations for implementation of FAIR practice by the FAIR in practice task force of the European open science cloud FAIR working group.
GO Meet
This section gives you an overview of conferences and workshops where you can meet up (virtually) with fellow GO FAIR members if you happen to attend the same event or are in the same town. In order for this category to work we do need your help! Please drop us a line at go-fair@zbw.eu and tell us where you can be met in the future.
External events
Meet INs:
- 11 November 2020 (5:00 – 6:30pm UTC), virtual: Meet Kristina Hettne, Mirjam van Reisen, and Francesca Oladipo at the RDA’s 16th Plenary meeting’s breakout session 5: IG – Libraries for Research Data: A Taste of FAIR Updates, Implementations and Trainings for Research Libraries.
Meet GFISCO:
- 03-06 November 2020, Vienna (Austria): Meet Luiz (GFISCO) and IN representatives Peter (GO Inter), Barbara (GO Inter), João Moreira (GO Inter) and Robert Pergl (VODAN, GO Inter, FAIR StRePo) at the 2nd Workshop on Conceptual Modeling, Ontologies and (Meta)data Management for FAIR Data. Submit your paper by 27 July 2020.
- 11 November 2020 (5:00 – 6:30pm UTC), virtual: Meet Christine Kirkpatrick, Chris Erdmann, Melissa Cragin, and Juliane Schneider from the US GO FAIR office at the RDA’s 16th Plenary meeting’s breakout session 5: IG – Libraries for Research Data: A Taste of FAIR Updates, Implementations and Trainings for Research Libraries.
- 11 November 2020, virtual: Meet Barend at the Neuro-Gairdner Open Science in Action Symposium.
- 12 November 2020, virtual: Say hello to Anja at the 2nd networking event “Digitalisation in life sciences” by BayWiss, the Bavarian Science Forum (in German).
- 19 November 2020, virtual: Listen to Barend’s keynote at the annual conference for the Centre for Digital Life Norway.
- 09 December 2020, virtual: Say hi to Barend at the Dutch PACS congress.
Meet GFISCO:
- 27 November-04 December 2020, virtual: International FAIR Convergence Symposium & CODATA General Assembly convened by GO FAIR and CODATA.
People of GO FAIR
In this section we would like to introduce you to members of our GO FAIR family. In each newsletter we will provide you with a short profile of two GO FAIR members.
IN representatives:
Giovanni Pizzi, IN Coordinator of the Materials Cloud IN
![]() | Giovanni Pizzi is senior researcher at EPFL, Switzerland. His research interests focus on high-throughput computational design and discovery of novel materials, and on the development and application of multiscale methods based on Wannier functions (he is co-author of the Wannier90 code). He is project leader of the swissuniversities “Materials Cloud” project, of the Open Science project OSSCAR of the Open Science Platform of the NCCR MARVEL and member of the Executive Committee of the MaX European Centre of Excellence. Giovanni coordinates the development of AiiDA (a software automating simulation workflows while automatically tracking their full provenance, thus guaranteeing reproducibility) and of Materials Cloud (a web platform for cloud data generation and FAIR-data sharing of computational research). He is coordinator of the GO FAIR Materials Cloud IN, aiming at providing open-source and robust tools to help researchers ensure reproducibility of computational research and FAIR access to the resulting data. |
Executive Board representative:
Peter Kraker, Member of the GO FAIR Executive Board & IN Coordinator of the Discovery IN
![]() | Peter Kraker is an expert in visualizing scholarly communication and a longtime open science advocate. He is a core team member of the Open Science Network Austria (OANA) and previously managed the topic of Open Science at the Know-Center (Graz University of Technology). In 2015, Peter founded Open Knowledge Maps, a non-profit dedicated to improving the visibility of scientific knowledge for science and society alike. Increased visibility is also what Peter and a group of researchers, librarians, and infrastructure experts are tackling in the Discovery IN – by applying human-centered design to the development of open user interfaces and other user-facing services for research data discovery. |
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