FAIROs: Towards FAIR Assessment in Research Objects

Abstract

The FAIR principles have become a popular means to guide researchers when publishing their research outputs (i.e., data, software, etc.) in a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable manner. In order to ease compliance with FAIR, different frameworks have been developed by the scientific community, offering guidance and suggestions to researchers. However, scientific outputs are rarely published in isolation. Research Objects have been proposed as a framework to capture the relationships and context of all constituents of an investigation. In this paper we present FAIROs, a framework for assessing the compliance of a Research Object (and its constituents) against the FAIR principles. FAIROs reuses existing FAIR validators for individual resources and proposes i) two scoring methods for assessing the fairness of Research Objects, ii) an initial implementation of the scoring methods in the FAIROs framework, and iii) an explanation-based approach designed to visualize the obtained scores. We validate FAIROs against 165 Research Objects, and discuss the advantages and limitations of different scoring systems.