Editorial



Dear GO FAIR community,
Autumn has been quite a busy season. Looking back at the past two months, we would like to highlight the following activities by our GO FAIR Implementation Networks and national offices:
Our newest Implementation Network, the FAIR Digital Object Forum, organized its first community meeting mid-October to disseminate the steps of FAIR Digital Objects until now and share the progress of its FAIR Digital Object Working Groups. The Data Stewardship Competence Centers Implementation Network held two workshops: At the National Chapters’ Meeting representatives from Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and the US met to share their knowledge and plan joint activities. During the GO Unite! workshop German research data management experts met to further exchange on research data management topics and deepen their cooperation. Our national office in Austria organized a webinar on “Let’s make our data FAIR!” and the US office demonstrated in their webinar how the US Geological Service has utilized the GO FAIR Pillars in its roadmap for enabling FAIR data.
We are thrilled about these recent activities in the realm of FAIR, and are looking forward to continuing joint FAIR efforts.
It is good to begin well, but even better to end well. Therefore, we are pleased to share with you that at the end of the month of October representatives from established and prospective GO FAIR national offices met to discuss how to best continue supporting the GO FAIR community and remain engaged with continuous developments on a national and international level. With the next meeting in early December, the share of responsibilities will be more concrete. Stay tuned!
All the best,
Laurent Crouzet, Barend Mons & Klaus Tochtermann
Strategic Directors, GO FAIR Initiative
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.
Outputs
- The 2nd edition of the Polish Data Steward School took place on 13 September 2021. Read all about it here!
- Ronald Cornet, GO FAIR Executive Board Chair and Rare Diseases IN member, talked about semantic interoperability in a webinar by MyScienceWork on FAIR Implementation Considerations.
- On 04-05 October 2021 national chapter representatives from the Data Stewardship Competence Centers IN met to share practices. Discover what they discussed!
- 42 participants from different local, institutional, and domain-specific research data management institutions met on 21 October 2021 for the second GO Unite! meeting of 2021 to talk about the activities of the three GO Unite! working groups, and to discuss new common requirements, topics and challenges of the community.
- Catch up on the activities by our Vodan IN on their YouTube channel. Discussions include the areas of Data Access and Control and Cedar Localization.
- The Materials Cloud IN has published a new open online tool to help researchers predict low-frequency vibrations in layered materials. This tool unlocks access to the simulation of these frequencies to a much broader audience, towards FAIR access to simulations.
- FAIRsharing has been recommended by the recently released Horizon Europe Programme Guide as the source for community standards to identify and report data and metadata, repositories and knowledgebase, and data policies.
- Karla Avanço from the CO-OPERAS IN reports from a training session on how to make data FAIR in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Session presenter was Elena Giglia.
Opportunities
- Call for Proposals for ESOF2022: Contribute to the dialogue around science and submit your proposal by 15 November 2021!
- Save the Date: On 8-10 March 2022 the 9th Open Science Conference 2022 will take place. The annual conference is dedicated to the Open Science movement and provides a unique forum for researchers, librarians, practitioners, infrastructure providers, policy makers, and other important stakeholders to discuss the latest and future developments in Open Science.
- Complete a survey by the RDA Professionalising Data Stewardship Interest Group that would like to examine the provision of data stewardship services internationally.
Interesting reads by our INs and national offices
- The Materials Cloud IN is among the groups that have initiated and implemented the OPTIMADE REST API, an API specification enabling seamless access and interoperability among over 10 different materials databases. By having the very same API to query and retrieve crystal structures from any database, the field of materials science is pushing toward FAIR access to data.

- The Materials Cloud IN focuses not only on FAIR access to data from simulations, but also on making advanced materials simulations FAIR. A team led by researchers in the Materials Cloud IN made a big step towards enabling FAIR simulations, by developing common interfaces for turn-key workflows that automatically compute key material properties. They also demonstrated this approach by implementing these common interfaces with 11 different quantum engines. And, by using the AiiDA workflow engine, they guarantee reproducibility of the simulations and simplify interoperability and cross-verification.
National offices news
- The GO FAIR office Austria reports:
- In the public online workshop “Let’s make our data FAIR!” on 19 October 2021 researchers and service providers got practical tips for the implementation of the FAIR principles. The video recording of the event and the presentation slides are available for viewing in Phaidra, the repository of the University of Vienna.
- Read their news item on “Repositories Enabling FAIR: Three Austrian Universities Go For InvenioRDM” to learn more about InvenioRDM.
- The Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation was officially founded on 13th October 2021. Visit the Zenodo webpage for materials related to its 1st General Assembly.
- GO FAIR US shares:
- Have a look at the GO FAIR US October newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.
- Chris Erdmann organized and participated in the 3rd Data Citation Community of Practice Workshop on 29 October 2021 where participants discussed three use cases (British Oceanographic Data Centre, German Climate Computing Center, and Ameriflux) on possible approaches to a “reliquary,” which is a large collection of digital objects used to assist in citation and credit. Recordings of the event can be found here.
- Read “Data in Action Spotlight: Advancing the Study of the Body’s Metabolic Systems through Bold Approaches in Data Repository Management” to learn more about the process of establishing “typical” ranges for metabolic data and about the challenges it has presented for medical researchers.
- On 28 October 28, 2021, GO FAIR US hosted a webinar on how USGS has utilized the GO FAIR Pillars in their roadmap for enabling FAIR Data. Viv Hutchinson gave a talk titled: “Mapping GO FAIR Pillars to the new USGS Roadmap for enabling FAIR Data.” Webinar video and slides will be available soon.
- Catch up on the latest advancements in research data management, repository management, and FAIR from this year’s virtual SciDataCon. Christine Kirkpatrick took part in the opening session on 18 October 2021 on FAIR Digital Objects. Session 1 and Session 2 recordings can be viewed at their respective links.
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
- 24 November 2021, virtual: Say hi to Elena Giglia and Ron Dekker from the CO-OPERAS IN and Discovery IN at the 1st TRIPLE Conference who will participate in the panel discussion on “GoTriple in the EOSC ecosystem”.
Meet GFISCO
- 24 November 2021, virtual: Meet Sarah Stryeck from the GO FAIR Austria office at the 1st TRIPLE Conference. Sarah will join the panel on “Business & Open Science – contrast or complement?”
INternal events
Meet GFISCO
- 18 November 2021, virtual: Meet the GO FAIR Austria team and learn more about the open source software InvenioRDM in the webinar on “Repositories for Research Data“. Sign up for other upcoming webinars in the series “Research Data Management in Austria”.
- 28 January 2022, virtual: Say hello to team members of the GO FAIR US office at the FAIR Points launch, a series for pragmatic approaches to FAIR.
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
Meet the coordinators of the FDO Forum: Christine Kirkpatrick, Dimitris Koureas, George Strawn and Peter Wittenburg

Christine Kirkpatrick oversees the San Diego Supercomputer Center’s (SDSC) Research Data Services division, which manages infrastructure, networking, and services for research projects of regional and national scope. Christine founded and hosts the US GO FAIR Office at SDSC, is Co-Executive Director of the West Big Data Innovation Hub, and PI of the EarthCube Office (ECO). She serves on the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) for the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and the National Academies of Sciences’ U.S. National Committee for the Committee on Data (CODATA).

Dr Dimitris Koureas is Chief Information Officer at Naturalis Biodiversity Center and executive director and co-initiator of the Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) European Research Infrastructure. He holds a PhD in biosystematics with post-doctoral expertise in biodiversity informatics and in the research data lifecycle. He is an Invited lecturer, teaching biodiversity informatics, across European universities. A member of the Technical Advisory Board of RDA, and executive boards of several multi-partner multi-million European projects. He also serves as a member of the steering group of the Dutch national infrastructure on DNA-based biomonitoring (ARISE) as well as various other board-level positions of international organisations.

Dr George Strawn is the Director Emeritus of the Board on Research Data and Information at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine where he focused on Open Science and FAIR data. Prior to joining the Academy, he was the Director of the Federal National Coordination Office for the Networking and IT Research and Development, NSF Chief Information Officer, the Executive Officer of NSF/CISE, Director of the CISE Division of Advanced Networking Infrastructure and Research, NSFnet program officer, Iowa State University Director of the Computation Center and Chair of the Computer Science Department. He is a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa and the Cosmos Club. He is also a member of the editorial board of the IEEE Computer Society magazine ITProfessional and writes two columns for the magazine.

Dr Peter Wittenburg has a background as Dipl.Ing. of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Berlin (1974), Dr. h.c. from Tübingen University (2013), Technical Director at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (1976-2011) and Senior Advisor for Max Planck Computing and Data Facility and GWDG (2012). Peter took on leading roles in international and European infrastructures (DOBES, CLARIN, EUDAT), is the Co-Founder of RDA, GEDE, and the FDO Forum, and Co-Writer of some relevant papers (Riding the Waves of Scientific Data, FAIR principles, Turning FAIR into Reality).
National office representatives: Introducing the GO FAIR Denmark office
Meet the team members of GO FAIR Denmark: Rene Belso, Anders Conrad, Anne Sofie Fink, Anna Mette Morthorst and Hannah Mihai

Rene Belso has been working for more than 20 years with research policy and research infrastructure provisioning, primarily within the area of supercomputing and data management. Rene has been employed in national and international governmental research agencies; led the Danish Center for Scientific Computing, been Danish delegate in various international infrastructure fora and working groups, currently e.g. the EOSC Sustainable Financing Task Force; PRACE Council and EUDAT CDI Council.
Anders Conrad is Head of Data Management at DeiC. He takes care of a number of issues nationally, including establishment of a national portfolio of storage and data management infrastructure services. He is a member of the reference group for the new national FAIR data management strategy. He is a member of the GO FAIR DSCC IN and works with GO FAIR for the continued development of M4M and the 3-point FAIRification Framework. Anders is involved in the EOSC Association where DeiC is a national Mandated Member, and he is also part of the RDA Organisational Assembly on behalf of DeiC.
Anne Sofie Fink has been a Data Management consultant in DeiC since May 2021 with a focus on FAIR dissemination and sharing of data, metadata and other digital objects – nationally and internationally – supported by services, documentation, networking, and cooperation. Her primary tasks in DeiC are to support implementation of the National Strategy for Data Management based on the FAIR Principles, the national calls for development of national data management services and the establishment and operation of the national EOSC coordination group.
Anna Mette Morthorst works as a Data Management consultant in DeiC with Open Science topics including FAIR software and reproducibility. Her primary role is to serve as the DeiC representative in Knowledge Exchange – an European Open Science partnership with six key national organizations. Most recently she has been co-leading the project Publishing reproducible research output.
Hannah Mihai has been working as a Data Management Consultant at DeiC since August 2020. She has a research background in geology and is now working with the organisation of M4M workshops and the development of an M4M – Train the Trainers workshop. She is a member of GO FAIR DSCC IN and also works in the context of RDA on a webinar series on FAIR research software.
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