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NWO research grant awarded to JupyterFAIR project

Serkan Girgin, Head of Center of Expertise in Big Geodata Science (CRIB) and Assistant Professor at Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at University of Twente has been awarded a research funding grant in Round 1 of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) 2021 Open Science Fund.

Girgin’s successful project proposal, written collaboratively with 4TU.ResearchData Community Manager, Connie Clare, and TU Delft Digital Competence Centre Research Software Engineers, José Carlos Urra Llanusa and Manuel Garcia Alvarez, aims to integrate researchers’ analysis and computation workflows with research data repository workflows to facilitate the process of data sharing. Along with 25 other projects, NWO’s funding of JupyterFAIR is a significant recognition of the project’s potential contribution to open science goals through the development of an innovative method for sharing FAIR research data

The JupyterFAIR project

4TU.ResearchData and ITC’s Geospatial Computing Platform will be the case study data repository and computing platform of the project, respectively. 

Serkan Girgin, Assistant Professor

With JupyterFAIR we aim to provide a simple and easy-to-use tool for researchers to implement FAIR data sharing practices throughout the entire research lifecycle. It will lessen the burden on researchers and will support open and reproducible science throughout all stages of the research process, including final research results and valuable intermediate data and findings.

Serkan Girgin, Assistant Professor

Many researchers use virtual research environments, such as JupyterLab, where substantial data is produced throughout the course of the research lifecycle. Often, however, data publishing and sharing typically happen only at the end of the research. Shared data often lack important metadata, mainly due to the need for manual inputs of information during the data publishing process. This project aims to develop and operationalize the open-source software tool JupyterFAIR for seamless, “one-click”, integration of research environments and data repositories, including metadata transfer and data quality checks. The tool will significantly decrease the amount of manual effort now required to publish, share and archive research data while encouraging more frequent data sharing in line with the FAIR principles.

Connie Clare, Community Manager at 4TU.ResearchData

JupyterFAIR will allow researchers to take a ‘snapshot’ of their data, including auto-generated metadata, and make them FAIR by publishing them in a data repository, such as 4TU.ResearchData, quickly and easily. The direct and seamless integration will help to lower the barrier for researchers by reducing the manual steps necessary to transfer research data from the production environment to the data repository.

Connie Clare, Community Manager at 4TU.ResearchData

The JupyterFAIR project will run from January through September 2022. In addition to the development of a methodology to integrate interactive research environments with research data repositories via the creation of the JupyterFAIR tool, the project includes thorough technical and user experience documentation. Community outreach and engagement activities are planned including the development of user’s and developer’s guides, step-by-step tutorials, and training workshops to enable wider use of the tool. You can follow updates about the project activities by following @JupyterFAIR Twitter account and also participate in the project via the GitHub repository, https://github.com/ITC-CRIB/JupyterFAIR.

NWO Open Science Fund

The NWO Open Science Fund aims to support researchers to develop, test, and implement innovative ways of making research open, accessible, transparent, and reusable, covering the whole range of Open Science. NWO wants to stimulate Open Science by incentivizing and rewarding researchers from all disciplines who are or would like to be at the forefront of this movement. With the Open Science Fund, NWO contributes towards changing the way academics are recognized and rewarded in the Netherlands. Twenty-six projects related to open science will receive a financial stimulus of up to 50,000 euros. The Open Science Fund is available to projects focusing on innovative ways of (open) publishing, sharing FAIR data as well as software, or projects that help drive the culture change needed to achieve open science. 

4TU.ResearchData

4TU.ResearchData is an international data repository for the technical, engineering, and design sciences. Its services include curation, sharing, long-term access, and preservation of research datasets. These services are available to anyone around the world. In addition, 4TU.ResearchData also offers training and resources to researchers to support them in making research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible (FAIR).

Written by Deirdre Casella (4TU.ResearchData) with Serkan Girgin (Center of Expertise in Big Geodata Science & University of Twenteand Connie Clare (4TU.ResearchData). Reviewed by Quirine van der Klooster (4TU Federation) and Robin Kwakman (ITC Faculty, University of Twente)