Implementing FAIR Wizard at UKCEH

Our ambition is to make the world a better place through science addressing climate change, promoting biodiversity, and creating sustainable ecosystems. Effective data management supports research integrity and transparency in tackling these challenges. The UKCEH Data Stewardship Team (DST) provides expert guidance on data management and stewardship, and the use of digital infrastructures. A key tool is FAIR Wizard, which aids the creation and maintenance of effective data management plans (DMPs) and guides researchers on aligning their data with the FAIR principles – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable.

Here we outline our journey with FAIR Wizard, its integration into UKCEH workflows, and its benefits.

Environmental research increasingly involves tackling multidisciplinary questions requiring collaboration and vast amounts of data. The FAIR principles offer a structured approach to manage these data challenges, enhancing dataset value and reusability. Adopting FAIR practices promotes integrative science, amplifies the impact of research, and aligns with the open science agenda.

FAIR Wizard helps in applying these principles by guiding researchers through a smart, domain-specific questionnaire to produce high-quality DMPs with minimal effort.

We’ve worked with our developer partners Codevence to adapt FAIR Wizard for UKCEH needs. We constructed a bespoke knowledge model specific to our research domains encompassing tailored questions, expert guidance, FAIR metrics and feedback on the data management plan.

The tool encourages collaboration by letting team members flag, comment on, and share responses, while researchers can generate custom data management plans in different formats. Users can also generate DMPs tailored for different funders or purposes from a single questionnaire, minimising duplication of effort.

FAIR Wizard has become an integral part of our data management approach, embedding the FAIR principles into daily workflows. Along with training, a Research Data Management hub, and project support from data stewards, it is contributing to our strategy of increasing FAIR data in UKCEH and fostering a culture that values and prioritises good data stewardship.

The UKCEH DST have further customised the FAIR Wizard for use by the Natural Environment Research Council’s Environmental Data Service (NERC EDS) to support grant holders, spanning all environmental science domains: atmosphere and climate, earth observation, polar and cryosphere, marine, terrestrial and freshwater, geoscience, solar and space physics.

See more details on our customisations and plans for future developments in our blog post for Codevence.

Our implementation of FAIR Wizard showcases the value of innovative tools in transforming research data management. By simplifying the creation of high-quality data management plans and promoting understanding and adoption of FAIR principles, FAIR Wizard has significantly improved our data stewardship practices.

This transformation highlights the potential for digital tools to enhance data management efforts across research communities, ultimately contributing to a more open and collaborative scientific environment.