[RDA Admin]

Status report and future outlook March 2020
This is the status report of the activities of the RDA FAIR Data Maturity
Model working group in the period since the second face-to-face meeting
at RDA14 in Finland.
It serves to provide background information for the members of the FAIR data
maturity model working group in preparation for the online meetings of 24
March 2020 (11:00 UTC and 20:00
UTC), as well as for the wider community of people with an interest in
evaluating FAIRness.
Comments on this status report are welcome on the mailing list of the
working group at ***@***.***-groups.org
.
Freezing the draft indicators and priorities (November-December 2019)
After the meeting in Finland, the editorial team created a frozen version of
the indicators
L4w8RRAw/edit#gid=1558529297> (version 0.04) for use in the test phase
scheduled for January 2020 with priorities of the indicators based on the
outcome of a survey in October 2019. Between the meeting in Finland and the
following online meeting on 4 December 2019
, two volunteer organisations
executed an ‘alpha’ test with the indicators that informed the approach for
the test phase in early 2020. The results of those tests were reported at
the meeting on 4 December 2019. At that meeting, the WG decided to change
the terminology of the priorities from ‘mandatory’, ‘recommended’ and
‘optional’ to ‘essential’, ‘important’ and ‘useful’.
Developing the guidelines (October 2019- March 2020)
Throughout this period, a living guidelines document
Wmeg/edit> has been in continuous development, containing an introduction
to the evaluation process and a more detailed description of the indicators
with suggestions on how the indicators could be evaluated, as well as a
glossary of terms
Wmeg/edit#heading=h.gjdgxs> . Additionally, a first draft of a FAIR data
checklist has been created as a condensed summary of the guidelines.
The Guidelines are still open for comment!
Conducting the test phase (January-February 2020)
In early 2020, ten test runs were executed by several volunteers using a
template proposed by the
editorial team. The results of the test were summarised and presented in the
online meeting on 13 February 2020
, with an overview of general issues that were brought up in the test
reports. All the information from the tests, including questions and
suggestions are included in a dataset
02f2ySSc/edit?folder=1-WS4rlitW155jmejpZSx4E3L5PrwoYh-#gid=1975710446> that
is being prepared and is available to the public under a CC-BY-SA licence.
Proposing a scoring mechanism (March 2020)
Starting with the online meeting in November 2019, and further developed
based on the comments in the tests and discussion in the online meeting of
13 February 2020, the editorial team proposed a two-layer evaluation method,
with one layer evaluating the maturity of each indicator on a five-level
scale and one layer providing a binary evaluation of the evaluator with a
summary per FAIR area. The five-level scale per indicator gives information
on how far along the journey toward FAIRness a resource under evaluation is,
while the binary evaluation gives an indication on the overall performance
of the evaluated resource against the FAIR principles at a given time.
Discussing open issues (March 2020)
Based on an analysis of the comments and suggestions received in the test
phase and from comments on the guidelines document, the editorial team
created a set of issues on GitHub
,
proposing to modify the draft indicators towards a final version. The issues
include proposals to drop indicators because they are out of scope,
proposals to combine indicators that overlap and proposals to rephrase
indicators.
Finalising the indicators and guidelines (April 2020)
Based on the conclusion of the discussions on the open issues on GitHub, the
editorial team will create a final version of the indicators and make the
associated changes to the guidelines document
Wmeg/edit> by early April 2020. At that time, the FAIR data checklist will
also be finalised.
Public review period (April-May 2020)
To comply with established procedures for RDA Recommendations, the finalised
indicators and guidelines document will be opened to a public review for a
four-week period, from mid-April to mid-May 2020, followed by a final online
meeting of the working group in late May 2020
to decide on resolutions to issues
raised in public comments.
Submitting the proposed RDA Recommendation (April-June 2020)
Finally, at the end of May 2020, the finalised guidelines document will be
submitted to the RDA council for endorsement as an RDA Recommendation.
Hoping many people can join in the calls next week.
Stay safe!
Kind regards,
Makx Dekkers and the editorial team

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