Hans Zauner

***Following FAIR principles is good for your colleagues, it's good for
the community, and it's good for science. But what's in it for the
researcher, in return for committing to open science? A new commentary
in GigaScience shows: A lot.***

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![](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/FAIR_data_principles-1-300x102.jpg){.wp-image-2154
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graphic: Sangya Pundir, CC-BY 4.0
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[It's easy to see how doing science in a FAIR
(]{style="font-weight: 400;"}**F**[indable,
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}**A**[ccessible,
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}**I**[nteroperable and
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}**R**[eproducible) way benefits the research
community and society at large. From the perspective of a stressed-out
researcher though, already pressured into doing more experiments and
analyses than can be crammed into a working day, isn't Open Science
first and foremost an extra burden? Carefully keeping track of heaps of
metadata, for example, doesn't sound fun at
all.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

[Javier Quilez *et al*., in a commentary
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[published this week in
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[GigaScience]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[,]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/gix100)[
make a strong case for the contrary: Yes, Open Science means following a
set of principles. Yes, it means not taking shortcuts when it comes to
documentation. And yes, there's some bureaucracy and planning involved.
What really counts, however, is that by following FAIR principles, labs
are rewarded with research projects that run smoothly and efficiently --
and, most of all, they are publishing results that are more reliable and
reproducible.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

## A story of two samples

To prove their point, Quilez *et al*. tell a didactic story of two
similar samples, generated by Pedro and Linda, respectively. Linda's
sample emerges from an open and FAIR pipeline,  Pedro's however... not
so. *"The life of b1913e6c1_51720e9cf was simple and fruitful, while
that of T47D_rep2 was full of accidents and sorrow"*, as the authors
write.

[Trouble for T47D_rep2 starts brewing when the project changes hands,
and a new member of the lab tried to make sense of it all. Wait, there
are four files named 7D_rep2 in different directories? And where's the
code that was used to generate plots? That's just the beginning of a
series of headaches, and the project is descending into a
nightmare.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

[Linda's project, on the other hand, is progressing smoothly and
quickly, even after it's been taken over by a colleague. That's because
Linda and her colleagues filled in metadata in a dedicated form, used
tools such as Jupyter notebooks  and followed FAIR
principles.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

[![](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1xvdc4-300x298.jpg){.alignleft
.size-medium .wp-image-2153 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="300"
height="298"
srcset="http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1xvdc4-300x298.jpg 300w, http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1xvdc4-150x150.jpg 150w, http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/1xvdc4.jpg 503w"
sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px"}At
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[GigaScience]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[,
our message to authors is: Be like Linda. Let's commit to FAIR
principles, together. We're doing what we can to make it  easy for our
authors. For example, we are collaborating with protocols.io and we are
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[experimenting with Code
Ocean]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/data-intensive-software-publishing-sailing-the-code-ocean-qa-with-ruibang-luo/)[,
a cloud-based computational reproducibility platform. We also have an
open repository,
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[GigaDB]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](http://gigadb.org)[,
with  dedicated data curators who help
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[GigaScience]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[
authors to organise and share their data -- ensuring it is reusable. And
in order to keep up with the rising number of submissions, we have
recently increased our team of data
curators.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

[From our beginnings five years ago (see our recent
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[5th birthday
editorial]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/gix064)[),
we were convinced that, without full data and reproducible workflows,
research articles are not science -- they are just advertisement for
science. As participating authors in the
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[original FAIR principles announcement
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18)[it's
been amazing to see the FAIR concept spread across the world
(]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[including
China]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](https://www.slideshare.net/GigaScience/scott-edmunds-fair-or-unfair-principled-publishing-for-data)[,
with ]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[Scott presenting on
them]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/8890)[
at the Chinese Academy of Sciences open access week event last year)
 and be taken up and promoted by governments and
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}[[even the
G20.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}](https://www.dtls.nl/g20-endorse-fair-principles/)[
Work is now underway on FAIR metrics to make the principles more usable
and actionable, and on top of these efforts this informal and less
abstract example will help make the case to researchers of their
utility.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

## See you at FORCE2017 in Berlin next week?

[As Quilez et al.'s story of two samples shows, clever tools and
technology can help to advance Open Science, and
]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[GigaScience]{style="font-weight: 400;"}*[
is keen to learn about and experiment with new
ideas.]{style="font-weight: 400;"}

That's why we are excited to attend next week's
[FORCE2017](https://www.force2017.org/) meeting in Berlin, to meet
innovators in Research Communication and e-Scholarship. Many FAIR-topics
are due be covered in what is the biennial gathering of most of the FAIR
community. We are proud to be one of the sponsors of the event, and we
have been actively participating since 2013, when it was still called
"Beyond the PDF". To get into FORCE mood, watch the talk our Executive
Editor Scott Edmunds gave there in 2015:

The post [Open Science is FAIRly
easy](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog/open-science-is-fairly-easy/){rel="nofollow"}
appeared first on
[GigaBlog](http://gigasciencejournal.com/blog){rel="nofollow"}.


<em>
 <strong>
  Following FAIR principles is good for your colleagues, it’s good for the community, and it’s good for science. But what’s in it for the researcher, in return for committing to open science?
 </strong>
</em>

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Open Science is FAIRly easy