Challenges and potential solutions for making science more open and FAIR (Keynote)
Köln
12:00
Konrad Förstner
At its core, science must serve society and contribute to
solving its challenges. Enhancing the efficiency, transparency, and
collaborative nature of scientific endeavors is essential for
achieving this goal. Open Science and the FAIR principles aim to
improve the scientific process by promoting openness, accessibility
and efficiency. Metadata, the essential information that
contextualizes research data, plays a crucial role in unlocking the
full potential of scientific data. Translating these ideals into
practical implementation, however, presents significant
challenges. These include the absence of established standards and
tools, as well as the slow adoption of these principles within
scientific communities due to a lack of supporting incentives and
norms. Additionally, the integrity of (meta)data infrastructure is
increasingly threatened by political interference, which can hamper
scientific progress globally. Recent events have demonstrated that
research infrastructure can be significantly impacted by policy
changes and funding cuts. These developments underscore the need to
rethink strategies for sustainable research data management and how
research infrastructures remain reliable for the global scientific
community.
The talk aims provide the foundation for a joint discussion that
brings together the perspectives and experiences of different research
communities.