2. About this book

2.1. How this book came about

This handbook was first written in a book sprint organised by the EU-funded FAIRsFAIR project. Led by the University of Göttingen, the project brought together a variety of RDM and teaching experts who wrote, edited and finalised the handbook. The aim of FAIRsFAIR, which ran from March 2019 to February 2022, is to develop and supply practical solutions to support the implementation and use of the FAIR principles throughout the research data lifecycle, including uptake of the principles in higher education.

Based on a survey and a number of focus groups (Stoy et al. 2020), an analysis of job advertisements as well as previous work by EDISON and other projects (Demchenko et al. 2021), FAIRsFAIR has developed a FAIR Competence Framework for Higher Education (ibid.). This handbook is a practical tool complementing the framework, supporting its application and implementation.

To extend the available pool of expertise beyond the project partners involved in this task (University of Göttingen, European University Association, University of Amsterdam and University of Minho), a book sprint was chosen as the method to prepare the handbook since this has proven successful in the past, as recently demonstrated by the FOSTER Open Science Training Handbook (Bezjak et al. 2019), Engaging Researchers with Research Data Management: The Cookbook (Clare et al. 2019), The Turing Way (The Turing Way n.d.), FAIR Cookbook for the Life Sciences (FAIR Cookbook n.d.), and the Top 10 FAIR Data & Software Things (Martinez et al. 2019).

The book sprint consisted of six three-hour sessions held between 1 and 10 June 2021 which involved a kick-off meeting, four dedicated sprint sessions, and a wrap-up meeting. In view of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the sprints were held virtually, using Google Docs for writing, Zoom for video conferencing, and Slack as an additional communication channel.

In a preceding application process, 38 experts from 14 European countries as well as the United States and Canada had been selected from a group of 53 applicants. Despite coming from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, they all possess ample relevant expertise in terms of RDM and the FAIR principles and, in most cases, experience in teaching and training and/or lesson, course, or curriculum design. Including the FAIRsFAIR colleagues, around 40 people contributed to the handbook by writing or reviewing and editing – or both.

The post-sprint editorial process was accompanied by an editorial team comprising book sprint participants and FAIRsFAIR project members. One step in this process was a public consultation on the first draft during summer 2021 to gather feedback and input from the wider community so as to further improve upon the first version. This was followed by a revision by the editorial team, a presentation of the revised draft in a workshop on 12 October 2021, and its subsequent finalisation. The handbook was first published as a FAIRsFAIR project deliverable in December 2021 (Engelhardt et al. 2021).

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