Turning FAIR Into Reality: Final Report and Action Plan from the European Commission Expert Group on FAIR Data

"The implementation of FAIR will be supported through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)3 . The federation of data infrastructure and application of standards will enable the discovery and interoperability of data. Member States should support this movement by aligning their policies and investments in relation to FAIR data and Open Science. In a wider global context, parallel initiatives such as the NIH Data Commons, the Australian Research Data Commons and also the proposed African Open Science Platform are important for the implementation of FAIR. Developments in the EOSC should align with these international movements and ensure that data are FAIR across disciplines and geographic boundaries beyond Europe....

Central to the realisation of FAIR are FAIR Digital Objects. These objects could represent data, software, protocols or other research resources. They need to be accompanied by Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and metadata rich enough to enable them to be reliably found, used and cited. Data should, in addition, be represented in common – and ideally open – formats, and be richly documented using metadata standards and vocabularies adopted by the related research community to enable interoperability and reuse. Software and algorithms, when shared, should include not just the source itself but also appropriate documentation including machineactionable statements about dependencies and licencing.

FAIR Digital Objects sit in a wider FAIR ecosystem comprising services and infrastructures for FAIR. The realisation of FAIR relies on, at a minimum, the following essential components: policies, DMPs, identifiers, standards and repositories...."