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Lygature contributes to FAIR Principles for scientific data management
This week, guiding principles for scientific data management were published in the Nature Publishing Group journal Scientific Data. These guidelines, ‘the FAIR Principles,’ address the need for widely shared and broadly applicable best practices around the publication of scientific data. Lygature contributed to the creation of the principles that will help to develop more efficient IT infrastructures for translational research.
Data can be seen as the primary output of scientific research. Its publication and reuse is necessary to guarantee validity and reproducibility, and to drive further discoveries. The FAIR Principles ensure that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). Foundations for the principles were laid in 2014, when a diverse group of stakeholders with an interest in overcoming data discovery obstacles met in Leiden, the Netherlands.
Lygature’s program manager Jan-Willem Boiten was one of the invited experts present at the Leiden meeting. He explains that there was an urgent need to improve the infrastructure that supports scientific data: “The 2014 meeting concluded with a draft formulation of foundational principles, which were later elaborated in greater detail. The publication in Scientific Data highlights the fact that these principles have become an internationally recognized standard for scientific data management – a tremendous achievement in only two years. In the Netherlands, we are already putting the FAIR Principles into practice in projects such as TraIT, BBMRI-NL and Data4lifesciences.”