About Community Curation
A collection of community-champion-specific pointers and information to help with domain-specific curation in FAIRsharing.
Please note: This page is for existing community curators. If are thinking about participating, please find out how to apply via our join us page.
Introduction
This section of the community champion GitBook pages focus on special tips and tricks for our existing champions when working with FAIRsharing records. If you're looking to participate, please see our joining page. If you've been accepted and aren't sure where to start, please see our Welcome page to find out everything you need to know.
You can also find general information about what it means to be a Community Champion at our FAIRsharing page describing the programme, or in our recent "Spotlight" blog post describing what it's like to be a community curator from Lindsey Anderson, one of our early adopters.
Please note: this GitBook page is designed to provide supplementary documentation for Community Champions regarding their curation on FAIRsharing. To find out how to create and edit records in FAIRsharing, please go to our general documentation.
Educational Material
You can make use of our Educational material in your own training, RDM documentation and just as a way of helping to explain what you do as a Champion within your research community. If you can't find what you need in the documentation and slides in this area, please get in touch with us and let us know what you need.
There are two areas where we have the majority of our Educational provision:
https://fairsharing.org/educational: Our Educational space on the main FAIRsharing site, which includes a variety of high-level factsheets co-authored by the Champions.
https://fairsharing.gitbook.io: This Gitbook site, which mainly contains in-depth documentation around the practicalities of FAIRsharing e.g. searching and updating records, creating accounts.
We also have a set of slides that were used for a recent training workshop that you can re-use however you like via their CC BY-SA 4.0 licencing.
What should I curate?
Many of our community champions come to us with a specific task already in mind. In that case, we work with them towards achieving that particular goal, e.g. starting with records associated with a particular project or consortium and expanding from there. Others are keen to start, but would appreciate a little help in knowing how best to focus their efforts.
Although we appreciate all curation that is performed by our community champions, if you want to know what types of curation are of most interest to our user community, then take a look at this list and focus on updating records in these areas:
Common metadata attributes and data processes for standards and databases. This information is updated from the Additional Information. The metadata in this section is important for describing how a resource is FAIR, and the more information you can provide here the easier it is to understand its FAIRness.
Checking and updating any data policies that already exist and are relevant to your domain. Some of the most useful resources within FAIRsharing are the policy descriptions, as they provide a list of standards and policies that funders, journals, and other policymakers recommend. Ensuring that the data policies in active use within your community are well described in FAIRsharing is a big help for your entire domain.
Links to identifier schemata. Describing how resources make use of persistent, unique identifiers is very helpful for the FAIRsharing community. You can do this by editing the relations to other records.
Links to other records of all types. Beyond the relationships to identifier schemata, any additional relationships will make the resource you're curating more discoverable (via graph traversal of the relationships) and showcase its interoperability.
Gaps in coverage of a domain. More generally, you can assess the completeness and coverge of your domain in FAIRsharing. Is it complete? If yes, then work towards enriching the metadata in existing records. Is it incomplete? Then start adding new records!
Approving New Records
We received feedback from our early community champions that they would like to see their records "revealed" / made public as soon as possible after they have been created. Therefore, rather than waiting until their curation is perfect, in-house curators perform a very quick triage for appropriateness and then un-hide the records as soon as possible. We can wait to approve the edits until the curation is in a satisfactory state.
Attribution
We would love your opinions on how FAIRsharing can push attribution about your fantastic curation efforts to various places to create high visibility within your communities. Here is what we have implemented so far, and also what we are considering. Please let us know your comments in the attribution channel on Zulip!
FAIRsharing profile pages
When you become a community curator with us, we add an Award outlining your curation domain and status as a curator for the current year. Each year you continue with the programme, you will receive an additional award. Here's an example from Kyle Copas' FAIRsharing user page:
Please note that the user pages currently have a simple display and edit interface. We are working towards making the user pages more dynamic and suited to your needs. Please let us know if you have any specific ideas about how you'd like them to look!
ORCID
We are a trusted partner with ORCID, and as such we are able to push your Community Curation Role to your ORCID profile as a service under the section "Membership and Services". For an example, take a look at the Membership and Services section of Lindsey Anderson's ORCID profile. Each year you continue with the programme, you will receive an additional service added to your ORCID profile.
APICURON - under consideration
APICURON (our contact there is Federica) currently have 3 databases, with a further 10 in the process of being integrated into this micro-attribution system. Information about the creation of new records, the updating of existing records etc are all stored so that you have concrete documentation of all of the curation you've performed with us. Our collaboration with APICURON is intended to attribute you and showcase your curation efforts.
If you would prefer to hide your curation activities as shown on APICURON, you just need log into APICURON and toggle visibility of your curation data.
It is possible for us to integrate APICURON badges on FAIRsharing's website, and also a list of curators / leaderboard widget.
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