D2.1 FAIR Cookbook

The FAIR Cookbook is an online resource with a focus on the Life Sciences with content (a collection of “recipes”) that help users to implement FAIR principles and/or improve the FAIRness of their data. It is a resource for ‘FAIR doers’ and its objectives are to:

• guide researchers and data stewards in their FAIRification journey, providing hands-on and technical step-by-step examples to follow;

• provide policy makers and trainers with practical examples to recommend in their guidance and use in their educational material;

• contribute to enabling the necessary culture change to deliver FAIR in organisations; 

• filling the current gaps between high-level FAIR principles and actual implementation.

The FAIR Cookbook currently serves over 70 citable recipes, which provide a broad and in-depth coverage of the technical operational processes allowing to deliver FAIR datasets and build FAIR capacity, as well a set of exemplar FAIRified datasets. The credited contributors include almost 100 researchers and data professionals across pharma and academia, including ELIXIR members not directly involved in FAIRplus. The FAIR Cookbook is offered as a JupyterBook, deployed and hosted on GitHub, with an ELIXIR sub-domain name. This infrastructure provides operational processes from community building to technical procedures such as deployment, identifier minting and editorial decision

The FAIR Cookbook integrates the dataset maturity model developed as part of Deliverable D2.2 as well as the Pistoia Alliance’s FAIRtoolkit. Work is in progress to cross-reference recipes to other complementary resources in the ELIXIR ecosystems, such as FAIRsharing (for standards and databases), RDMkit (for high-level signposting of research data management resources).

The FAIR Cookbook is an ELIXIR service provided by the UK and the Luxembourg Nodes. Other Nodes are working on adding this resource to their Service Delivery Plan, a step that will contribute towards the sustainability of the FAIR Cookbook as part of the ELIXIR FAIR Service Framework, part of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform. The membership of the Editorial Board also reflects the role that ELIXIR Nodes play for the future of this resource.