Survey on bridging the gap between funders and communities – perspectives on benefits and challenges of FAIR assessments

Dear colleague,

Thank you for the survey and for this summary document. For me it brings interesting additional insight on the FDMM and possible follow-up activities for the Maintenance Group, one of them being as you say to use it to prepare a wider survey to be submitted to the general community. The views listed in the executive summary are useful to keep in mind when working on the FDMM, and more generally on FAIR assessment, e.g. in the current efforts on the definition of "FAIR for software".

I found some typos in the text. I can provide a list, but I think that it should be useful to have the whole text fully checked before it is published in its final form.

Thanks again to the editors and WG co-chairs for the important work performed by he WG.

Best regards

Francoise Genova

Dear colleagues,

The FAIRsFAIR project welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on the report titled “Survey on bridging the gap between funders and communities – perspectives on benefits and challenges of FAIR assessments” to be submitted as an RDA Working Group supporting output.

First, we thank the authors for their work and would like to offer some suggestions for consideration.

The report could greatly benefit from a clearer description of the scope, focus and methodology of the survey. The title could also reflect the internal nature of the survey’s audience and respondents.Beyond the low statistical representativeness recognised in the report, the methodology followed does not seem very robust. It does not offer a strong case to derive real consensus on the benefits and challenges of FAIR assessments as seen by the funders and the ‘research communities’.

It is unclear why different questions were asked to different groups of respondents. This makes comparison very difficult. It is also unclear how the individual responses were collected (free text?) and collated and if the collated texts represent a consensus among respondents. Following the FAIR data principles spirit, we encourage the WG to publish the survey’s underlying anonymized data if possible.

We also note that some of the strongest responses regarding for example the difficulty to define the communities themselves, or the need to plan consistent funding for data infrastructure were not included in the executive summary.

Overall, we fully agree with the conclusions of the report that the weaknesses identified by the authors themselves make this survey and report an interesting contribution for the Working Group but it does little to address the initial question and its added value to external stakeholders is somehow limited. It is nevertheless a good starting point to think about a wider and deeper follow up survey as suggested.

More specific comments and suggestions can be found in the attached document.

Mustapha Mokrane, project co-Lead

On behalf of the FAIRsFAIR project

(Apologies for sending this feedback one day after the deadline)