The FAIR Office Austria will help aligning tools and services for research data management with the FAIR principles. The corresponding workshop report is now available.
FAIR on the rise
Making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) is becoming one of the key tasks and challenges of researchers and developers of research infrastructuresThe FAIR principles are becoming more and more important for research funders and also underpin the endeavors of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to create a trusted, virtual, federated environment in Europe to store, share and reuse digital outputs from research across borders and scientific disciplines.
FAIR Office Austria
FAIR is the central topic in the proposal of FAIR Data Austria, opens an external URL in a new window, one of the projects funded by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research in the 2020-2022 period. The project facilitates the development of tools and services for Research Data Management in alignment with the FAIR data principles.
The preliminary concept of the FAIR Office Austria was developed during a full-day kickoff workshop in September 2020. The workshop attendees identified a clear need to distill the sum of information on FAIR from international initiatives and to translate and make it applicable to Austrian research institutions. The FAIR Office will therefore act as an information and knowledge hub providing relevant information on new international developments to academic institutions in Austria. In addition, the FAIR Office will report to national and international stakeholders and initiatives on the state of implementation of FAIR in Austria. Prospectively, the Office will also coordinate the mutual exchange of information, experience and best practices on FAIR within the Austrian scientific community.
For the effectiveness of a FAIR Office Austria, interactions with distributed FAIR reference points at research performing organisations will be crucial. The FAIR Office will thus establish and coordinate a network of local stakeholders, supporting them with solutions for specific issues and challenges, such as discipline-specific requirements and the FAIRization of services.
A core team from three Austrian universities (Graz University of Technology, TU Wien and the University of Vienna) has been selected for the initial phase of planning and establishing the FAIR Office during the span of the project till December 2022.
