Overview

Feel free to choose one or more of the activities below to pursue.

Read

Read the article where it all began: the FAIR Guiding Principles were first codified in The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (Wilkinson et al. 2019).

You might also like to explore the GO FAIR website.

If you do not already have one, register for an ORCiD.

Then, see if you can link your ORCiD to your institution’s research systems.

Explore

In this hunt for research data, we are going to explore re3data, Research Data Australia and Zenodo. You are asked to follow the instructions and complete the answers to the questions below.

Hunt 1

re3data.org

  1. Go to re3data.org
  2. Browse by subject
  3. Select geosciences
  4. Select one geoscience repository record (and sub-discipline will do) and answer the following questions:
    1. In which country does the repository originate?
    2. How many datasets does it contain?
    3. What content types does it contain?
  5. Select a repository and open the URL and answer the following questions:
    1. Is there a citation for the repository?
    2. Can you see a DOI for the repository?

Hunt 2

Land Information NZ Data Service

  1. Go to the Land Information NZ Data Service repository and answer the following questions:
    1. Who runs this repository?
    2. What format are the datasets it contains?
  2. Staying in the repository, search for a city or location of your choice
  3. Select a record and answer the following questions:
    1. What is the title of the data?
    2. What is the license applied to the data?
    3. When was the dataset first added to the repository?
    4. How many views has it had?
    5. What file formats are available for downloading the data? (hint: click the download tab)

Hunt 3

Research Data Australia

  1. Go to https://researchdata.ands.org.au/ Answer the following questions:
    1. How many research organisations from around Australia contribute to RDA?
    2. List three research organisations who contribute to RDA
    3. List three subjects you can search by in RDA
  2. Search for “Weddell Seals” and select one of the datasets that appear in the search results. Answer the following questions:
    1. How many times has the dataset been viewed? Cited?
    2. Is the data openly accessible?
    3. Does an open license apply to the data?
  3. Scroll down to the relationships graph. Interact with the graph to find out the relationship between the dataset and other research outputs, objects, people etc.
  4. Click on “access the data”. Answer the following question:
    1. What metadata is required for citing the data e.g. title, date etc?
  5. Download the dataset and open it up. Answer the following questions:
    1. What format is the data in?
    2. What are the column headings?

Hunt 4

Zenodo

  1. Open Zenodo.org and answer the following questions:
    1. Who owns/maintains Zenodo?
    2. List five research output types contained in Zenodo
  2. Search for a topic of your choice and filter by dataset as a type
  3. Find a dataset that has been:
    1. Indexed in OpenAire
    2. Has more than 100 downloads
    3. Has more than 150 views
    4. Is linked to more than 1 version
  4. Navigate to the principles page and read about how the Zenodo repository responds to the FAIR principles. How many of these resonate with the services your organisation provides?

Hunt 5

  1. Open Zenodo.org and find a record for software. Answer the following questions:
    1. What is the title?
    2. What is the DOI?
    3. Is it linked to GitHub?
    4. Which license applies?
    5. Does it show versions?
    6. How many views? Downloads?
    7. Is it open access?
    8. What is the publication date?

Credit: This worksheet is based on activities N Simons for FSCI course 2019.