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Introduction

Focusing on FAIR and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) upskilling, the Skills4EOSC project has developed a FAIR-by-Design Methodology for Learning Materials that aims to ensure high-quality reusable training from both the learners' and trainers’ perspectives. The Skills4EOSC FAIR-by-Design Methodology can be easily adapted to serve as a guideline for designing FAIR digital objects in general including data and research software. FAIR-IMPACT has developed guidelines for recommended metadata standards for research software to ensure it is FAIR and, more recently, has defined a set of 18 metrics that can be used to assess the FAIRness of software.

The main goal of the workshop is to introduce participants to the projects’ resources and show how they can be used to help create a broad range of FAIR by design outputs. We expect this workshop to be of high practical use to participants when it comes to increasing their capacity for supporting the production and reuse of FAIR digital objects. Therefore, it is aimed at any interested stakeholder who would like to become more aware with regards to the FAIR principles in their daily activities by both improving the FAIRness of existing digital objects or employing a FAIR-by-Design approach when developing new digital objects.

The workshop will kick off by introducing the participants to the FAIR-by-Design Methodology and the FAIR-IMPACT recommendation and metrics for software and then focus on their application. A guided example based on FAIR-enabled software digital objects provided as a second use case next to the learning digital objects will be used as an icebreaker. The second part of the workshop will be highly interactive with real-time feedback. Participants will work in small groups to follow the guidelines of the framework and methodology and to dive into the specific considerations and steps needed to enable the different FAIR aspects for a particular class of digital objects. Groups will focus on educational or training resources, and research software, or can opt to work with any other type of digital object they wish to explore.

The objective for the second part is to motivate outside-the-box thinking among the participants thus stimulating a safe, creative environment in which ideas can flow freely and thus help improve the work being done in both projects. In this way, participants can learn how to implement the FAIR-by-Design methodology and use the available outputs and recommendations from both Skills4EOSC and FAIR-IMPACT in their day-to-day practice for various types of digital objects. They will also have the opportunity to share experiences related to other available tools and methods related to the FAIR-IMPACT implementation catalogue that helps identify the tools and solutions most appropriate for different use cases.

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