Short Description
A FAIR Implementation Profile (FIP) is a collection of FAIR implementation choices made for all FAIR Principles by a community (for example a research project or an institute). It was developed by the GO FAIR Foundation.
Once published, a FIP can be reused by others, thus acting as a recipe for making data FAIR by a community based on agreements and standards within that community. Therefore, a FIP aids in achieving FAIR principle R1.3, which states that "(Meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards."
Why is this step important
In a FIP it is documented which FAIR-enabling resources (FER) were used within a community for each of the FAIR principles. A FER is any digital object that helps to achieve an aspect of FAIRness (for instance ontologies such as the Human Phenotype Ontology and licenses such as CC BY ).
FIPs can be used as the basis to optimize the reuse of existing FER and to improve cooperation within and between domains.
Pre-made and thoroughly tested FIPs developed by reliable communities have the potential to be widely reused by other communities and significantly speed up the transition to informed FAIR implementations.
How to
A FIP can be created by answering a set of questions either in the Google spreadsheet FIP mini-questionnaire or in a dedicated version of the online data management platform Data Stewardship Wizard called the FIP Wizard.
For the FIP mini-questionnaire nothing more is needed than simply creating your own copy and start filling it out. The disadvantage is that although the FIP produced by a mini-questionnaire is perfectly understandable by humans it is less suitable for machines, meaning that further analysis and comparisons between FIPs in mini-questionnaire format will be more difficult.
For the FIP Wizard you need to create an account and go through the FIP Wizard user guide to understand the system and workflow. The FIP Wizard is set up as a question-answer form with both human readable (PDF, Word, Excel, CSV) and machine-actionable (Nanopublications) output.
FIPs in nanopublication format can be considered FAIR datasets and are publicly available for reuse via a dedicated online database.
Practical Examples from the Community
The Virus Outbreak Data Network (VODAN)-Africa is a joint activity of CODATA, RDA, WDS, and GO FAIR which has implemented FIPs for their VODAN-Africa project.
The WorldFAIR Project, a multi-disciplinary project that crosses 11 domains, is a collaboration between CODATA and RDA. It uses FIPs as a methodology for listing the FAIR implementation decisions made within the project. They have summarized their experiences in this article.
The European Platform for Neurodegenerative Diseases (EPND) has implemented FIPs and uses them to help make data ready for their data platform.
Further reading
Authors / Contributors
Mijke Jetten
Kristina Hettne
Jolanda Strubel
Sander de Ridder