Leontien is a collaborative PhD student at The National Archives, UK and University College London, her research is about access to born-digital material. She attended iPres2019 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by DPC supporters.
The next session that I will be covering from iPres 2019 is another New Horizons session, this time focusing on access and the FAIR data principles. The FAIR data principles are a set of guiding principles in order to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. If you want further information on the FAIR principles, the LIBER Europe report on FAIR is a great place to start, it gives a good overview of the basic principles and a comprehensive list of references that you can follow up.
As access is one of the main research topics in my PhD project I really wanted to attend this session and see how other organisations and people approach this topic. Just like the previous session that I covered, three papers were presented, with some time left for questioning at the end.
FAIR Data Work @ DANS: Implementing Metrics, Reviews and More
The first talk was given by Marjan Grootveld from DANS. In this talk Grootveld highlights how DANS has been implementing the FAIR data principles. DANS was involved in the original publication of the principles, but have been part of many projects ever since, from developing and testing FAIR metrics, to developing tools that rate the FAIRness of datasets and even creating FAIR checklists to help researchers. Grootveld concluded her talk by showcasing one of the future project that DANS will be working on called FAIRsFAIR. This Horizon 2020 project hopes to provide a platform for using and implementing the FAIR principles in the day to day work of European research data providers and repositories.
CoreTrustSeal-certified repositories: Enabling Finable, Accessible, Interoperable and Resuble (FAIR)
The second talk was given by Jonas Recker and Mustapha Mokrane and compared the FAIR guidelines to the requirements of the CoreTrustSeal certification. During their talk they were able to highlight how the FAIR principles align quite closely to the requirements of the certification and how working towards a certification such as the CoreTrustSeal could enable repositories to hold FAIR data.
Australian Law Implications on Digital Preservation
The last talk was something completely different from the previous two, not focusing on the FAIR principles, but on law implications and what that means for access to digital material. The talk was given by Denise de Vries from the Flinders University in Australia, this gave the talk an even more interesting spin, as it would be considering Australian law implications, which I was completely unfamiliar with. De Vries talked about the difficulty of dealing with discovering sensitive material in a collection, specifically when regarding data relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and culture. She hopes by pointing out these difficulties surrounding this material that she is able to encourage other institutions to set up guidelines for sensitive material, because in a lot of cases it may not come down to a legal choice, but it could become more of an ethical or moral decision and de Vries highlights why institutions should be aware of this.
Question Round
The question round in this session focused on the FAIR principles with a number of questions on the Australian law, these questions ended up being more around explaining certain parts of the talks and led to no real discussion surrounding the topics. Nevertheless, the session was very interesting and it was nice to see the contrast between the FAIR principles and their push for open access, but also how legal obligations, such as the Australian law, can limit this access. If you want any further information on the session, the papers can be found here.