The winner, Edna Xian Hu, demonstrates commitment for sharing and FAIRification of microscopy data in Norway.
The measures to make microscopy imaging data openly accessible for active re-use are an important inspiration for others in this field.
We are very happy to see this inspiring example from Norway.
From the winner, Edna Xian Hu
“ I serve as both a microscopy facility staff member and a scientist. My role as a scientist allows me to dive deeply into the field of bioimaging, providing me with a better understanding of the challenges faced by our facility users.
One thing I have noticed is that most researchers overlook the significant cost (time and effort) required for data curation in the process of producing an imaging-related scientific paper. Many people believe this process is merely "copying data from the microscope," which should take a maximum of 10 minutes. However, data curation is much more than that; it also includes the obligation to make the raw data available to certain groups of people even after the publication of the manuscript.
This time, I used my own publication to complete the entire life cycle of imaging data. The highlight that earned me the prize was the effort I made to share the published data in a public repository with appropriate metadata. I hope this experience will enable me to assist users of our imaging facility more effectively. I also hope that other researchers in similar fields can benefit from the raw data and gain insights and understanding.
Thank you, DLN, for recognizing this effort.”
The dataset:
https://doi.org/10.6019/S-BIAD1201
Centre for Digital Life Norway (DLN) has the DLN FAIR data award to highlight leading examples of FAIR data management in Norwegian life science research. This is the forth year it is being offered. The nominations received for the award were from a diverse range of disciplines, and DLN is inspired to see many examples of FAIR data management in our research environments.
About the evaluation
The evaluation committee consisted of Korbinian Bösl (DLN and ELIXIR Norway), Daniel Henry Øvrebø (Senior academic librarian, University of Bergen Library), Susanna Röblitz (Professor at Computational Biology Unit, UiB), Thomas Stevenson (DLN Junior Resource Group, UiB), Ragna Breines (DLN). We are particularly thankful for the external members' active and thorough participation in evaluating the nominated candidates.
In order to evaluate the efforts of the FAIR data management, and not only the repository features, the committee manually evaluated the data sets as based on the FAIR-plus indicators.
About FAIR data
FAIR data management aims to increase the reuse and impact of research data and is an important part of the Open Science initiative. FAIR principles encourage making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. This allows a wider community to use existing data and facilitate knowledge discovery. Following the principle of “as open as possible, as closed as necessary”, FAIR data should always be interoperable and reusable, but cannot always be possible to access openly (for example, patient sensitive data cannot be directly accessible, but it should be possible to know how to obtain access for specific research questions).