The FAIR Island

Project

Real-world examples of FAIR and CARE at field stations

The relationship between people, place, and data underpins some of the greatest challenges, and opportunities, of the 21st century. Relationships between human communities and their natural and built environments are increasingly mediated through digital data. In addition, there has been general enthusiasm for, and work towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) data for Open Science.

The FAIR Island Project translates FAIR Data Principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016) and the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Carroll et al., 2020) into practice for scientific field stations through the development of place-based data policies and critical research infrastructure centered on machine-actionable data management plans.

About the Project 

Using working field stations that are linked to a range of international research networks in marine and terrestrial environments, the Project builds interoperability between pieces of critical research infrastructure

Place-based Data Policy

Building on experience with the Tetiaroa Ecostation, we have developed a generic place-based data policy for reuse and modification at other sites.

Creating Connections with Persistent Identifiers

The FAIR Island Project leverages persistent identifers including RORs for ogranizations, ORCiDS for peoples and DOIs for scholarly outputs, pre-registration and DMPs to link field station research back to the place.  

Integrate with Existing Infrastructure

Integration with other systems is a core requirement and scalable benefit of the Project. These PID connections facilitate further development of the DataCite Commons interface as a field station dashboard. Additional social network analysis is also possible. 

Participating Field Stations

The FAIR Island Project started as a partnership between the California Digital Library (CDL), the University of California, Berkeley, Gump South Pacific Research Station and the Tetiaroa Society’s Ecostation.

coral with black and white striped fish

Tetiaroa Ecostation

Tetiaroa, French Polynesia

Gump field station

Gump South Pacific Research Station

Moorea, French Polynesia

a bird in flight over island

Interested Field Stations? 

If your site is interested in collaborating please send us an email at info at fairisland.org.

Recent Outputs

Here are some of our recent activities. Find all of our published outputs in our Zenodo community

*New Publication* FAIR Island: real-world examples of place-based open science

Robinson, E., Buys, M., Chodacki, J., Garza, K., Monfort, S., Nancarrow, C., Praetzellis, M., Riley, B., Wimalaratne, S., & Davies, N. (2022). FAIR Island: Real-World Examples of Place-based Open Science. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7384146

Generic Place-based Data Policy V1.0.2

10.5281/zenodo.6977454

Official 1st release of the template Place-based Data Policy. The Generic Place-based data policy is a template derived from the draft Tetiaroa Ecostation Data Policy and meant to be an example for other field stations, marine labs and research stations that may want to use it.  

2021 FAIR Island Annual Report

10.5281/zenodo.6536701

A brief summary of 2021 accomplishments.

Gigascience webpage

(Project Output) FAIR Island: real-world examples of place-based open science

We are excited to announce that our first paper from the FAIR Island Project was published on March 23. This paper summarizes the FAIR Island concept and some of our initial experiments.  Erin Robinson, Matthew Buys, John Chodacki, Kristian Garzas, Steven Monfort,...

Generic Data Policy V1.0 Release and Github/Zenodo Workflow

 After more than a year of community consultation and feedback, the FAIR Island Project team published the first official release of the Generic Place-based Data Policy to Zenodo. The Generic Place-based data policy is a template derived from the draft Tetiaroa...

Provide Data Policy Feedback with Hypothes.is

Several weeks ago we posted about the migration of our data policy work from Google Docs to Github. With that migration we began to use Github issues for both repos that hosted the Generic Data Policy and the draft Tetiaroa Data Policy. This was great - it allowed us...
FAIR Island Newsletter - Project 1

Project Newsletter #1

We just sent our first project newsletter! Below is a quick blurb and to read the full thing, check out this link. To be on the list to get these quarterly updates moving forward click subscribe at the bottom of the page. Thanks for following along!Hello from the FAIR...

Guest Blog for UCNRS introducing FAIR Island

The FAIR Island Team is establishing a collaborative relationship with the University of California Natural Reserve System (UCNRS). This is a network of 41 reserves that cover most of California's natural habitats (see the image below for details).  As part of that...

Adding Field Station RORs to DataCite Metadata

One thing that has become apparent in our FAIR Island Project is that there is not a standard way to acknowledge the field station where the research was done. Researchers come from all over the world and have their own home institutions, which they list as their...

FAIRsFAIR Review of Tetiaroa Data Policy

The FAIR Island Project participated in the FAIRsFAIR Policy Enhancement Support Programme in the first part of 2021 sharing the draft Tetiaroa Data Policy. The Policy Support Programme was an open call for policy enhancement support launched in late 2020. The call...

Migrating our Data Policies to Github

The Tetiaroa Data Policy and the Generic Place-based Data Policy that evolved from it, were both originally drafted in Google Documents. It was an easy way for many people to edit directly, comment and view, but it masked the evolution of the Policy, which is one key...

FAIR Island Featured in the FAIRsFAIR Implementation Stories!

This Spring FAIRsFAIR published an implementation story [1] on FAIR Island aligned with their theme: "Supporting Data Management Planning for FAIR." From the FAIRsFAIR website: FAIRsFAIR Implementation stories illustrate good practices in research communities and...
ROR logo

Tetiaroa Society ROR

We are very excited that the Tetiaroa Society application for a ROR was approved! ROR stands for Research Organization Registry and RORs are organizational identifiers. The Tetiaroa Society ROR is https://ror.org/04p8xrf95 The Tetiaroa Society ROR was in the first...

Get Involved

There are lots of ways to support the FAIR Island Project. We are looking to integrate with existing infrastructure projects to show the power of reuse. We love working with students to provide a real-world project to learn from. We are also actively looking to expand the field sites that we work with. If any of this sounds interesting, please connect! 

ten people standing around a boat in shallow water

Contact Us

Questions, comments, or advice?
info@fairisland.org

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