Data Monitor pilot: one step closer to FAIR

16 representatives from 14 participating institutions met with Data Monitor staff to review progress of the pilot. This pilot was one of the first pilots to commence as part of the Open Science services agreement between UNL, UKB, NFU, NWO and Elsevier.

A total of 18 institutions joined the Open Science pilot and through the user group meetings interact with the product development team at Elsevier to evaluate progress of the ongoing pilot and provide feedback and ideas how to further improve. This update is from the third user group meeting specific to the Data Monitor pilot.

What is Data Monitor and how can it help to progress Open Science in the Netherlands?
Data Monitor aims to find and make accessible the metadata of research data deposited in data repositories all over the world. As such it supports the Dutch ambition for FAIR data; Data Monitor links the metadata of the datasets to the authors’ institutions thus providing insights into the availability of research datasets at an institutional level and individually at the researchers’ level.

What are the learnings so far from this pilot?
The Data Monitor pilot is successful in identifying significantly more data sets than are currently identified in the institutional information systems and capable of integrating with the CRIS.  However, looking deeper into the data, the partners have made the following key observations:

• The meta data of the research data in the various data repositories is at times inconsistent and incomplete and some datasets cannot be associated with an institute or its researchers’
• Not all the data in the data repositories are research datasets
• Some relevant repositories (including some non-DOI repositories) are not yet indexed

The product team at Data Monitor are now making improvements to Data Monitor to mitigate the above-mentioned issues by amongst others, improving the matching of datasets with authors and expanding its coverage. It is expected that by the end of the Summer 2023, these improvements will be implemented and that Data Monitor will positively impact the journey to FAIR data.

The success of the pilot relies on the feedback and constructive interactions between the partners and the team at Elsevier. With the continued improvements, we are working to support a more open knowledge infrastructure, together.