This article explores the global implementation of the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific management and data stewardship , which provide that data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. The implementation of these principles is designed to lead to the stewardship of data as FAIR digital objects and the establishment of the Internet of FAIR Data and Services (IFDS). If implementation reaches a tipping point, IFDS has the potential to revolutionize how data is managed by making machine and human readable data discoverable for reuse. Accordingly, this article examines the expansion of the implementation of FAIR Guiding Principles, especially how and in which geographies (locations) and areas (topic domains) implementation is taking place. A literature review of academic articles published between 2016 and 2019 on the use of FAIR Guiding Principles is presented. The investigation also includes an analysis of the domains in the IFDS Implementation Networks (INs). Its uptake has been mainly in the Western hemisphere. The investigation found that implementation of FAIR Guiding Principles has taken firm hold in the domain of bio and natural sciences. To achieve a tipping point for FAIR implementation, it is now time to ensure the inclusion of non-European ascendants and of other scientific domains. Apart from equal opportunity and genuine global partnership issues, a permanent European bias poses challenges with regard to the representativeness and validity of data and could limit the potential of IFDS to reach across continental boundaries. The article concludes that, despite efforts to be inclusive, acceptance of the FAIR Guiding Principles and IFDS in different scientific communities is limited and there is a need to act now to prevent dampening of the momentum in the development and implementation of the IFDS. It is further concluded that policy entrepreneurs and the GO FAIR INs may contribute to making the FAIR Guiding Principles more flexible in including different research epistemologies, especially through its GO CHANGE pillar.

The FAIR principles have been widely cited, endorsed and adopted by a broad range of stakeholders since their publication in 2016. By intention, the 15 FAIR guiding principles do not dictate specific technological implementations, but provide guidance for improving Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of digital resources. This has likely contributed to the broad adoption of the FAIR principles, because individual stakeholder communities can implement their own FAIR solutions. However, it has also resulted in inconsistent interpretations that carry the risk of leading to incompatible implementations. Thus, while the FAIR principles are formulated on a high level and may be interpreted and implemented in different ways, for true interoperability we need to support convergence in implementation choices that are widely accessible and (re)-usable. We introduce the concept of FAIR implementation considerations to assist accelerated global participation and convergence towards accessible, robust, widespread and consistent FAIR implementations. Any self-identified stakeholder community may either choose to reuse solutions from existing implementations, or when they spot a gap, accept the challenge to create the needed solution, which, ideally, can be used again by other communities in the future. Here, we provide interpretations and implementation considerations (choices and challenges) for each FAIR principle.

The FAIR guiding principles aim to enhance the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of digital resources such as data, for both humans and machines. The process of making data FAIR (“FAIRification”) can be described in multiple steps. In this paper, we describe a generic step-by-step FAIRification workflow to be performed in a multidisciplinary team guided by FAIR data stewards. The FAIRification workflow should be applicable to any type of data and has been developed and used for “Bring Your Own Data” (BYOD) workshops, as well as for the FAIRification of e.g., rare diseases resources. The steps are: 1) identify the FAIRification objective, 2) analyze data, 3) analyze metadata, 4) define semantic model for data (4a) and metadata (4b), 5) make data (5a) and metadata (5b) linkable, 6) host FAIR data, and 7) assess FAIR data. For each step we describe how the data are processed, what expertise is required, which procedures and tools can be used, and which FAIR principles they relate to.

In a world awash with fragmented data and tools, the notion of Open Science has been gaining a lot of momentum, but simultaneously, it caused a great deal of anxiety. Some of the anxiety may be related to crumbling kingdoms, but there are also very legitimate concerns, especially about the relative role of machines and algorithms as compared to humans and the combination of both (i.e., social machines). There are also grave concerns about the connotations of the term “open”, but also regarding the unwanted side effects as well as the scalability of the approaches advocated by early adopters of new methodological developments. Many of these concerns are associated with mind-machine interaction and the critical role that computers are now playing in our day to day scientific practice. Here we address a number of these concerns and provide some possible solutions. FAIR (machine-actionable) data and services are obviously at the core of Open Science (or rather FAIR science). The scalable and transparent routing of data, tools and compute (to run the tools on) is a key central feature of the envisioned Internet of FAIR Data and Services (IFDS). Both the European Commission in its Declaration on the European Open Science Cloud, the G7, and the USA data commons have identified the need to ensure a solid and sustainable infrastructure for Open Science. Here we first define the term FAIR science as opposed to Open Science. In FAIR science, data and the associated tools are all Findable, Accessible under well defined conditions, Interoperable and Reusable, but not necessarily “open”; without restrictions and certainly not always “gratis”. The ambiguous term “open” has already caused considerable confusion and also opt-out reactions from researchers and other data-intensive professionals who cannot make their data open for very good reasons, such as patient privacy or national security. Although Open Science is a definition for a way of working rather than explicitly requesting for all data to be available in full Open Access, the connotation of openness of the data involved in Open Science is very strong. In FAIR science, data and the associated services to run all processes in the data stewardship cycle from design of experiment to capture to curation, processing, linking and analytics all have minimally FAIR metadata, which specify the conditions under which the actual underlying research objects are reusable, first for machines and then also for humans. This effectively means that—properly conducted—Open Science is part of FAIR science. However, FAIR science can also be done with partly closed, sensitive and proprietary data. As has been emphasized before, FAIR is not identical to “open”. In FAIR/Open Science, data should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. Where data are generated using public funding, the default will usually be that for the FAIR data resulting from the study the accessibility will be as high as possible, and that more restrictive access and licensing policies on these data will have to be explicitly justified and described. In all cases, however, even if the reuse is restricted, data and related services should be findable for their major uses, machines, which will make them also much better findable for human users. With a tendency to make good data stewardship the norm, a very significant new market for distributed data analytics and learning is opening and a plethora of tools and reusable data objects are being developed and released. These all need FAIR metadata to be routed to each other and to be effective.