JupyterFAIR: Integrating research environments with data repositories for FAIR research data management 

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. 

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, Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente

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, 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.

Writ­ten by Deirdre Casel­la (4TU.ResearchData) with Serkan Gir­gin (Cen­ter of Exper­tise in Big Geo­da­ta Sci­ence & Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente) and Con­nie Clare (4TU.ResearchData).
Reviewed by Quirine van der Kloost­er (4TU Fed­er­a­tion) and Robin Kwak­man (ITC Fac­ul­ty, Uni­ver­si­ty of Twente)
Cov­er image:  https://storyset.com/online and NWO Open Sci­ence Pro­gramme