Final Report: FAIR Hackathon Workshop for Mathematical and Physical Sciences Research Communities

The FAIR Hackathon Workshop for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences (MPS) February 27-28, 2019 in Alexandria, Virginia brought together forty-four stakeholders in the physical sciences community to share skills, tools and techniques to FAIRify research data. As one of the first efforts of its kind in the US, the workshop offered participants a way to engage with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) Data and metrics in the context of a hackathon. The workshop was designed to address issues of public access to data and to provide experience with FAIR tools and relevant hands-on experience for researchers. Existing FAIR tools and infrastructure were introduced. Hands-on hackathon breakout time was devoted to testing FAIR metrics and tools against physical sciences data. The hackathon invited MPS research data management stakeholders to react to the FAIR principles and to jointly consider gaps in the MPS data sharing ecosystem in the context of researcher’s actual projects. FAIR Gap analysis was introduced as a way to identify community-specific tools or infrastructure that could dramatically enhance the ability of domain scientists to make their data more FAIR.