The GO FAIR Foundation invites organisations to self assess their FAIRness based on the GO FAIR interpretation of the FAIR guiding principles. This assessment may lead to an endorsement handed out by the GO FAIR Foundation. Parties that receive the endorsement have the opportunity to become part of a GO FAIR consortium, however this is not mandatory.
To be eligible for the endorsement label, an organization needs to adhere to these 7 common principles:
- All applications follow and adhere to the FAIR guiding principles (explicitly as defined in https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618).
- The generic implementation choices leading to a FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) are made by, or fully supported by the various players in a data-exchange network.
- Machine readability and actionability is the default, unless (currently) impossible.
- Data and metadata should be as open as possible and as closed as necessary. For instance, not all background software needs to be open source, not all data can be open.
- FAIR infrastructures should be as distributed as possible and as centralized as necessary. Centralization of data in a data-warehouse construction should be avoided as much as possible.
- No provider / vendor lock-in (multiple solutions as a goal). Solutions should provide an infrastructure whereby f.i. multiple service suppliers would have the opportunity to build applications or information layers on top of the data. The aim is to avoid a socalled SPOS or SPOP ( a Single Point of Solution or a Single Point of Provider).
- FAIR Project teams should actively support the 3-way approach of having: 1) a platform or layer for Meta-Data-Publication, for instance a FAIR DATA POINT (FDP) , or a meta-data-layer, 2) a Meta-Data-Schema for increasing the interoperability of the data and 3) a FAIR Implementation Profile indicating the implementation choices for the community involved, like vocabularies, licenses, agreements, access-controls, RDF requirements, etcetera.
If an organization complies with these principles, and would like to receive an endorsement, they can send an email to info@gofairfoundation.org. After receiving an application, GO FAIR Foundation will start the endorsement process.