Rec. 5: Sustainable funding for FAIR components

[sjDCC]

The components of the FAIR ecosystem need to be maintained at a professional service level with sustainable funding.

• Criteria for service acceptance and operation quality, including certification standards, need to be derived and applied with the aim to foster a systematic and systemic approach.
  Stakeholders: Research communities; Global coordination fora; Funders.

• Regular evaluation of the relevance and quality of all services needed to support FAIR should be performed.
  Stakeholders: Research communities; Data stewards.

• Sustainable funding and business models need to be developed for the provision of each of these components.
  Stakeholders: Data services; Funders.

[hollydawnmurray]

F1000 position: Agreed. With the volume of research results growing, the digital infrastructures that currently support access to and preservation of data are likely to require ongoing development to ensure that it provides a sustainable solution. It is therefore vital that funders who impose requirements which rely on these services also consider the costs associated with data deposition, archiving and preservation. A willingness from funders to meet and/or share in the costs required to maintain and expand data infrastructures will ensure the proper functioning of these services (similar to that proposed for data management in Rec 32).

[ghost]

4TU.Centre for Research Data position: In our opinion it would be beneficial if the national funder would take a bigger role in sustaining certain fair components, e.g. a national DMPonline service.

[katerbow]

DFG position: Comments to Recommendation 5 relate closely to those to Recommendation 4. The matter of sustainable funding of infrastructure components accompanies the discussion about data sharing since its beginning and any stakeholders are well aware of its necessity. Again, it would be helpful here to work out the priorities according to which specific components needs to be funded and implemented first.

[Drosophilic]

FAIRsharing.org position: Completely agree. As @hollydawnmurray has commented above, it is essential that funders and others who impose requirements of FAIRness also provide the funding to support the funding of those components, including FAIR registries, FAIR metrics, repositories and standards.

[ScienceEurope]

This recommendation requires the development of some criteria and standards. Those will be necessary for a smooth implementation and running of the EOSC. Two aspects need to be considered: who will be in charge of setting those standards? And how can be assured that they do not create too much bureaucracy?

[eiroforum-it-wg]

EIROforum has published its input for the consultation which is available online (20180724-EIROforum-position-paper-EOSC.pdf). The paper highlights a number of practical points EIROforum members consider essential to ensure the EOSC can effectively interlink People, Data, Services and Training, Publications, Projects and Organisations, including aspects related to Rec. #5 “Sustainable funding for FAIR components.

[RCN2018]

• We (the RCN) are not sure if we understand what is meant by "Sustainable funding and business model need to be developed for … each of the FAIR components". We think funding and business models need to be adapted on a higher level, e.g. at level of institutions, RI and services. Some level of user payment, eg through a membership-payment at level of institutions could ensure a check that the services are in line with users' needs and something they are willing to pay for.

[bertocco]

INAF (astronomy) position:
that's fine as far as existing frameworks get proper funding to be sustained

[pkdoorn]

Thumbs up, but be careful not to make the access to research data the responsibility of private enterprise alone. There is the tendency that big scientific publishers of today will develop into the big scientific data providers of tomorrow. There is a fundamental public responsibility here to provide basic sustained access to publicly funded data, and such public institutions (like public archives) need to be publicly funded.

[mromanie]

ESO position
Since it is well known that open doesn't mean free, the provision of funding is mandatory to make FAIR viable.

Do we understand correctly that being certified would be a necessary condition to access funding?

[gtoneill]

Sustainable funding is definitely crucial for the implementation and sustainability of FAIR Data. It is not fully clear what support levels are targeted in this recommendation. Institutions will naturally play a role as will infrastructures and service providers: each should perhaps be financially supported to some extent to get the implementation of FAIR Data moving, yet also be independently responsible for some or all costs in the long-term. A critical question is who should fund each level and for how long? It should also be clear what sustainability of FAIR Data means: for how long should data be guaranteed to be stored and be FAIR and what will happen when FAIR shifts meaning in the not-so-distant future?

[MSoareses]

This is a comment for this recommendation and similar for Rec. #33 Agree these seem as suggested above very closely related.

Sustainable business models for publishing are essential to maintaining effective peer review infrastructures (from online editorial systems, journal editorial teams to the platforms that host and preserve published peer-reviewed literature).

These services and infrastructures will link and often be in the position to assess quality of FAIR data which is published alongside or linked to journal articles. Their sustainability in view of the potential and effective ways in which journals foster FAIR data (examples at Elsevier include data journals like Data in Brief or those publishing Software like SoftwareX).

[npch]

SSI position:

We also note that many of the systems around supporting FAIR, from repositories to publishing workflows, automated processing and checking of metadata, all depend on software. Software itself needs to be well managed - versioned, tested, documented, packaged correctly and adhere to standards. The challenges in software are complex and need to be properly costed in terms of resources and skills development.

[aidanbudd]

ELIXIR-UK position:

• Criteria are problematic
• Important to support a low barrier of entry coupled with transparent reporting.
• Indicators focused on peer review can lead to unintended consequences (see the mess that REF has caused in the UK research practice).
• High quality peer reviewers use different criteria than needed for long-term infrastructure
• Incentives and help for data stewards needed in the funding models

[rachbruce]

@jisc support the objective to develop FAIR services which operate in a reliable and sustainable way. We agree with @f1000 comment, but also there are other stakeholders with some responsibility e.g. research performing institutions. Also the quality and certification standards to support this should not constitute unsurmountable barriers which effectively could preclude some community-driven repositories (and other community services) from participating. We therefore consider it crucial to ensure that certification standards are fit for purpose, are tested with the community, and include a graduation scheme which specifies targets against which adopters can work to improve.
On a technical level, operation quality criteria should clearly specify that FAIR data must be interoperable across a variety of services and infrastructures. Additionally, applicable systems should also ensure data portability.
Lastly, we consider that the development of sustainable funding and business models is a task which should be addressed together with research communities and institutions.