The Enabling FAIR Data project aims at making research data sustainable. 'Fair' stands for findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable. With this aspiration, publishers, data repositories, scientific societies, and institutions have come together a year ago to form the Enabling FAIR Data Coalition to set the fundamentals of using data FAIR in the scientific sense. This week, jointly developed guidelines were published in the journal EOS.

The Enabling FAIR Data project, funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and coordinated by the American Geophysical Union AGU, aims to facilitate a straightforward and consistent access to geoscientific data. GFZ is one of the initial signatories to the now published Commitment to Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences which forms the basis of the guidelines now outlined.

For GFZ this commitment results in the obligation to proceed with its engagement on the way to make research data and software citable. A main instrument is the GFZ Data Services. Kirsten Elger, project manager of GFZ Data Services and the driving force behind GFZ's FAIR commitment: "With the Data Services, we offer a data repository with citable publication of research data that is committed to the approach of FAIR Data. Only in this way can we ensure that data is accessible, well documented, and reusable."

The Enabling FAIR Data project was preceded by the Coalition on Publishing Data in the Earth and Space Sciences (COPDESS) which was referenced as early as 2016 in the GFZ's Guidelines on Research Data. A next step for Enabling Fair Data is now to gain additional supporters and to establish the guidelines globally (ak)

To the EOS article

An overview on FAIR research data management is provided in: Elger, K., Bertelmann, R., Ulbricht, D., Haberland, C., Lauterjung, J., Radosavljevic, B., 2018. FAIR am GFZ. System Erde, 8 (1). DOI: http://doi.org/10.2312/GFZ.syserde.08.01.8

Zum Commitment Statement in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences