4. Stakeholders and their roles in the FAIR process

There are two groups of stakeholders, each with distinct but closely interrelated roles in implementing the FAIR Principles: data producers and operators of data platforms and repositories. A person, a group, or an institution can be active in both roles.

Although this guide is primarily aimed at data producers, the role of repositories and data platforms is discussed to help the audience better understand the interaction between these two groups. This allows them to assess more effectively which tasks related to supporting FAIR fall within the responsibility of operators of data platforms. Operators of data platforms are given suggestions on how to optimise and communicate their services more effectively.

Data producers

The group of data producers includes everyone involved in generating, processing, and making available data relevant to research. This includes researchers in the strict sense, as well as individuals working in memory and infrastructure institutions responsible for creating and managing data related to resources or objects.

Cultural research often relies on information and resources provided by others, such as libraries or repositories. Therefore, researchers are not only data producers but also subsequent users. They depend on the availability of material (‘data’) to conduct analyses and draw conclusions. Researchers must be able to assess whether the available data is suitable for their research. The material can take many forms, including images, audio or video materials, historical sources, texts, software-based data processing outputs or analysis results, or survey results, and it also includes the research outcomes of others. As users, data producers benefit from the FAIRness of this data.

Operators of data platforms

A data repository is a service that stores and provides access to research data. It is a future-proof tool that ensures data to remain accessible and usable in the long term. Given the essential data services in the humanities from libraries, museums, and archives, it is appropriate to expand the group of ‘data platforms’ beyond research data repositories. This also includes specialist or interdisciplinary online offerings of digital representations of the cultural assets in their collections, as well as web portals and federated systems with a similar focus, including their interface-based data services.

A data repository has a number of specific FAIR-related tasks:

• active and long-term preservation of the data
• publication of machine-readable metadata to enable web-based searching, both across services and domains
• assignment of permanent, unique identifiers to ensure citability
• management of online access to the data so that it can be used by other human and machine actors
• application of licensing conditions and indication of the terms of use for the data
• optional: controlling the quality of datasets and improving the metadata, e.g. by applying standardised vocabularies

Data platforms follow different strategies, priorities, and levels of implementation on their path to offer a FAIR service. While research data repositories in the strict sense (e.g. RADAR, heiDATA, Zenodo) have often already largely implemented the FAIR requirements, platforms focusing on cultural assets are also in the process of aligning their data servicess with transparent, Linked Open Data-based usage scenarios.

Therefore, the information provided in the following chapters under ‘The role of data platform operators’ should also be regarded as recommendations for this group.

For data producers, it is intended to serve as a guide during project planning, helping them determine which information about the requirements and services of potential publication platforms should be collected. Early clarification makes it easier to structure the data in a way that can be well-received and presented by the publication platform. This information may not be easily found on the websites of platforms, so personal contact is also recommended.