Experiences from the FAIR-IMPACT National Roadshow in Denmark

webinar
learning
experiences
An online event to showcase FAIR activities happening across European Union countries.
Authors

Luke W. Johnston

Kristiane Beicher

Published

October 28, 2024

We attended the virtual FAIR-IMPACT National Roadshow series hosted in Denmark entitled FAIR Principles in national and institutional data management policies in Denmark on October 4th, 2024.

The aim of this series is, as described on their website:

To better connect with national initiatives, …, conceived as online events with the aim of speeding up FAIR adoption by communities in different European countries. The roadshows extend the network of projects and initiatives that FAIR-IMPACT already collaborates with, introducing another platform to promote FAIR-IMPACT recommendations, good practices, and assessment tools.

This post shares some thoughts and impressions we had on what was discussed during the event. The series could be split into these general themes:

Overall impressions

First things first, unfortunately, most of the presentations were very text heavy. These type of presentations are much more difficult to read, understand, and connect with. Especially because often times the text is fairly vague as there is only so much text one can put on a slide. It would be amazing if more people used websites to keep their documents of work, and in their presentation they could link to that website for more information. More often than not, presenters talk about what they’ve done, but don’t actually show it (more on this in the next section).

Another impression we had was that a lot of these initiatives are headed by researchers. Which, on the one hand is great, but on the other, researchers rarely have the necessary technical skill or knowledge to adequate handle the tasks required for what is needed to be done. It isn’t any fault of the researchers, it simply is the way academia is structured. We need more technical people in these positions to give expert input on what is needed to be designed or developed.

Introduction to general activities

The first few presentations were about activities at a high level happening within Denmark. While it was good to get a general overview, we were left with the impression that lots of activities were discussions in working groups, but not much in more visible and tangible activities.

For instance, we in the Seedcase Project follow the “making work visible” principle, which we achieve by putting as much communication, tasks, and documentation on GitHub or websites as possible. A good example of this is that we put (most) major decisions as posts on a website.

While discussions are necessary, it helps to have something to discussion on. In this case, some design document or diagram, or some prototype of a workflow using explicitly described tools and methods would help immensely to anchor these discussions onto something tangible and more “visible”. Something that we can directly critique or give feedback on. We’d love to see more sharing and disseminating of documents or communication activities since we believe these are just as legitimate sources of output.

Another thing we observed was that many of the initiatives were centered around building up networks of researchers or encouraging them to collaborate on activities to improve FAIR data practices. However, some key things were missing:

  • No mention of initiatives to provide funds for projects that have a heavy software or data infrastructure component
  • No mention of encouraging for budget items for hiring highly skilled personnel who often require a higher salary than is typically seen for “technical personnel” at university or research institutions.
  • No mention of “upskilling”, skill development, or training initiatives to improve the capacity and competency of researchers or others who want to enter into this more computationally technical space.
  • No mention of trying to improve hiring practices/policies at universities or research institutions who don’t seem to value or be aware of the need to have embedded software and data engineering groups within research environments.

Challenges faced and lessons learned

The two presentations that went over practical examples of work trying to implement FAIRer data practices were quite good, especially because they got more into the challenges and barriers they faced and still face.

Richard Dennis, who works at the University of Copenhagen, made lots of good comments particularly on the challenges, such as:

  • Around the skills gaps seen within universities between researchers and professionals managing the research data.
  • The limited resources (time and funds) and of skilled personnel. Often researchers will seek out or ask for advice or support for their own work, which takes away the personnels’ time for working the improving things and working on their own projects.
  • The lack of higher level visionary strategies to solve these issues. There’s a big gap between what is talked about at the policy level and what researchers are actually doing.
  • Not enough investment and value in addressing these fundamental issues around data and the current state of things.

Another presenter, Mareike Buss from the Copenhagen Business School (CBS), also mentioned some challenges around the lack of skilled technical personnel and on the many things needed to be done but with only few people hired to do them.

She pointed out that because CBS is a relatively small institution, they are much closer to their users than colleagues in other universities. This means that it is easier to have a close relationship with the researchers and to understand their needs. She also pointed out, that having the support of the senior management is crucial for the success of the various projects.

Summary

This webinar was overall a good insight into the current state of things in FAIR data around Denmark. It reinforced many expectations and personal experiences of ours, while also giving hope that our work has some strong value in moving this area along!