VREs are predestined to support many aspects of FAIR because of their characteristics to provide a workspace for collaboration, sharing data and simulations and/or workflows. The FAIR for VRE Working Group has worked on a checklist to measure FAIRness in science gateways. This list considers how to address the complexity in regard to which target group is addressed – developers or users – and the granularity such as VREs as software frameworks, services, APIs, workflows, data and simulations. We assume that not only VREs as software frameworks are FAIR but that they also are FAIR-enabling for the digital objects they contain. The objective of this session will be how to recognize and incentivize that providers, developers and users are actively working towards FAIRness of digital objects. The idea for this session is to address this via badges. It probably makes sense to split the badges for the four principles Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. There are many open questions beyond this granularity such as how to create badges, who gives such badges, what are the rules for the duration of badges?

0-10 min Introduction to IG and FAIR4VRE working group (Sandra Gesing)
 

10-50 min – Panel – How to incentivize researchers to aim for FAIRness of their digital objects?

(Moderator: Sandra Gesing, Panelist: Chris Erdmann, Isabelle Perseil, Claire Stirm, Kheeran Dharmawardena, Zhiming Zhao)
The panelists will present about their involvement with FAIR and/or VREs. They will discuss which steps in regard to FAIRness they prioritize and whether they think there are low hanging fruits they recommend to start with supporting FAIR in VREs. What are existing incentives for researchers to invest the extra time in supporting FAIR?

50-90 min Group discussion and preparing for a new working group
(Moderator: Andreas Rauber)

• How to create badges that reflect achievements of a person or of a project or a community in a VRE?

• Who gives such badges? 

• Can badges be given automatically for some actions or does it need to be always manually? 

• What would badges look like regarding granularity?

• What is the lifetime of a badge?

• Is FAIRness evaluation maybe too complex to address via badges? 

This session is aimed at anyone who is or has been involved in using, developing or maintaining any form of online collaborative environment or their individual components. 

In preparation for this meeting, attendees could refer to the notes from the previous sessions from past RDA Plenary meetings that focused more on understanding the commonalities and differences of the different VRE/SG/VL platforms from the different global regions and collaboration tools. Attendees could think about what kind of acknowledgement for work towards FAIRness would be rewarding to them.