5.0 Developing a FAIR data strategy

AgriConnect is determined to apply FAIR principles to avoid inefficiencies and the economic costs of efforts duplication, legal risks, and missed opportunities that might hamper its mission’s accomplishment. To aid decision-making and collaboration, stakeholders need to be able to easily locate data. This platform must be accessible for stakeholders with different levels of digital literacy, meaning that usability considerations must be ensured.

Moreover, as the platform combines diverse data sources and formats, data must follow the interoperability principle, which facilitates collaboration and data sharing.

Finally, data must be reusable, so that they continue to add to the richness of new work, rather than stagnating after collection or publication.

To adhere to the FAIR Principles, AgriConnect plans to create a system that is open access, thereby increasing its utility to end users, and making the collected data available (when possible) for other researchers to find, access and reuse. The organization will include a technical perspective through data formatting, hosting infrastructure, and sharing agreements and permissions.

This commitment, from a large, respected organization, should act as an institutional and cultural guidepost for other organizations to adhere to the FAIR Principles within their own work, thereby increasing FAIR visibility and utility for future work within Dataland.

AgroThrive is launching a project in the lower-middle income nation of Datapur to bolster the local government’s capacity to scale inclusive agriculture and attract private sector investment. It aims to create a more enabling policy environment for Datapur’s agricultural sector by providing evidence-based policy recommendations.

Its work specifically includes access to credit and affordable financing options for agricultural inputs, infrastructure development (transportation and storage facilities), educational opportunities for smallholders, fostering technological advancements, climate resilience, and land tenure security.

AgroThrive believes that all of these conditions should also be viewed through an intersectional lens, with special attention given to including traditionally marginalized communities.

Additionally, AgroThrive will work with Datapur officials to increase the state’s implementation capacity by helping to improve government planning, accountability, delivery of services and sector coordination.

The AgroThrive team has determined that the FAIR Principles are an integral component of the project’s long-term success. The principles are transversal to all the project’s phases, from data gathering to findings dissemination. This will allow AgroThrive to leverage existing data and analyses, speeding up the policy development process and optimizing resource use.

Once a final report is prepared and shared with the government of Datapur, AgroThrive will (to the best of its capabilities) adhere to the FAIR Principles. It will do this by making the data used, and the resulting policy recommendations, findable and accessible to those working in the broader AgDev sector, so they can be built on or reused for similar initiatives, with interoperability as an enabling condition for transparency, collaboration, and data sharing.

This will allow the recommendations to become a part of the evolving ecosystem around the country’s policy environment, rather than stagnating after they have been shared with the government.

As the provision of policy recommendations is largely based on the analysis of existing data sources, applying FAIR to the project will necessitate data sharing agreements to be put in place with relevant data owners. As much of this data may be sensitive (or proprietary, in the case of private sector data), these agreements will need to include privacy provisions and data safeguarding measures, and explain how the data sources will be used and why they are necessary to the project’s outputs.

Trust-building with stakeholders is also a vital component of the project, both to facilitate data sharing and to create buy-in for the targeted recommendations (thereby employing a ‘bottom-up’ approach to the recommendations).

This will be done through open-source publication, and the appropriate use of metadata, in addition to sharing the recommendations in widely accessible journals and platforms. As a large, well-respected organization, this adherence and promotion of FAIR will act as a guidepost for other organizations to consider FAIR in their own work.

NGBT is launching a project in the low-income nation of Datastan, where increases in crop productivity and yields will provide tangible benefits to a population overwhelmingly made up of smallholder farmers, and to the country as a whole, for which agriculture is a main driver of economic growth. NGBT is cognizant of the fact that women play a crucial role in this domain.

In Datastan, NGBT is developing a more nutritious varietal of barley that is more resistant to climate change and produces greater yields. The project not only seeks to optimize crop varieties capable of thriving in challenging environmental conditions, but also indirectly addresses the exacerbation of child nutrition gaps due to climate-related disruptions. Simultaneously, it empowers women, who are often disproportionately excluded from field-research projects, by enhancing their access to resources and opportunities in agriculture.

If successful, this would allow farmers to use less farmland without decreasing the quality of their outputs. This work will involve both small and large data points, including (but not limited to) historical and current weather data, data on current crop yields and production, land use for agricultural purposes, and government data on the population involved in the production of the target crop.

Planning for the application of the FAIR data principles is vital from the project’s inception. As this project is focused on the creation and eventual sharing of newly generated data, NGBT will need to plan for how the data will be published. This may include data, methodologies, research materials, results, budgets, or other useful information within the project’s outputs for greater findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of results. The main objective is to ensure the research process is transparent, so that others can review, critique and build on their work.

Additionally, NGBT must consideration how to communicate results with relevant stakeholders (through in-country meetings or workshops), and, after the results are published, collect stories about how this positively impacted the community.

It must also ensure that the outputs of the project contribute to the overall scientific community, and allow results to be built on in future research. The outputs will need to be appropriately labeled with metadata and stored in an accessible platform, which will facilitate their findability and accessibility for researchers working in similar spaces.

The NGBT team will also, through mapping of the data ecosystem and data assets, decide on the most appropriate storage system for research outputs, with an eye toward greater interoperability.

As a well-respected and influential organization, the consideration of FAIR principles will influence other researchers and organizations on the utility of FAIR, as the scientific community as a whole (including NGBT) benefits from findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable research outputs, which can help to advance discovery and reduce repetition of research.