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External Resources & Further Reading

Existing recommendations for implementing FAIR data

The concept of “FAIR data” and its principles were developed within FORCE11—an international community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders—and were first introduced in 2016 in the article “The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship.”

The key points of the article are:

Purpose of FAIR Principles
The FAIR principles aim to improve the infrastructure supporting the reuse of scholarly data. They provide guidelines to ensure that data and associated metadata are well-managed and can be easily found, accessed, integrated, and reused by humans and machines.
Applicability Beyond Data
While initially focused on data, the principles are also applicable to algorithms, tools, and workflows, recognizing that all digital research outputs should adhere to these standards to facilitate transparency and reproducibility.
Stakeholder Benefits
Implementing FAIR principles benefits various stakeholders, including researchers, data publishers, software developers, funding agencies, and data scientists, by promoting efficient data sharing and reuse.
Emphasis on Machine-Actionability
A significant aspect of the FAIR principles is the emphasis on machine-actionability, ensuring that computational systems can automatically find and use the data, which is crucial in the era of big data and complex analyses.

Wilkinson, Mark D., Michel Dumontier, IJsbrand Jan Aalbersberg, Gabrielle Appleton, Myles Axton, Arie Baak, Niklas Blomberg, et al. ’The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship’. *Scientific Data* 3, no. 1 (15 March 2016): 160018. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

Nearly a decade later, the concept of FAIR data has spread widely and gained worldwide recognition in the scientific community. Data FAIRness has become a key requirement for publicly funded research projects. The Horizon2020 Programme, for instance, has developed specific guidelines for FAIR data management.

Despite the success of the FAIR principles, creating findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable digital research products can be challenging. To address this, many institutions have developed resources and materials to guide both individual scholars and organisations in creating FAIR data and implementing FAIR data services. Here are some notable examples:

How to FAIR is ideal for individual scholars who want to learn FAIR principles from scratch. This user-friendly portal offers a 60-minute video course on Research Data Management and FAIR, practical guides with examples and videos—covering topics like file formats, metadata, persistent identifiers, and data licences—and a quiz to test your knowledge of FAIR principles.
GO-FAIR provides a quick guide on implementing FAIRness with a focus on machine-actionability. The guide is organised by operative points and includes practical examples.
FAIRsFAIR (Fostering FAIR Data Practices in Europe) is a comprehensive portal for universities and research organisations, offering resources to help data stewards implement FAIR data repositories and support educators in training personnel and students on FAIR principles.

Many recommendations and guides on implementing data FAIRness are aimed at scholars across different fields and disciplines, including the humanities. An example is the set of recommendations developed by the Research Data Alliance,6 which covers topics such as data citation, certification of repositories, metadata management, and interoperability. OpenAIRE’s quick guide on making FAIR data, included in their Research Data Management guides, is another example.

Some recommendations are specifically developed for particular research areas, adapting FAIR principles to the unique requirements of specific domains.

PARTHENOS’ Guidelines to FAIRify data management and make data reusable serve data producers, archivists, and users in humanities and social sciences who want to make research data as reusable as possible. The PARTHENOS guidelines are written in clear, accessible language for audiences with varying technical expertise. Each guideline includes specific recommendations for both individual scholars and research institutions and infrastructures.

The Recommendations of the ALLEA Working Group for E-Humanities “Sustainable and FAIR Data Sharing in the Humanities” were published in 2020, providing the most thorough guide for implementing FAIR principles in the humanities. These recommendations walk users through each phase of a digital object’s lifecycle—from planning through dissemination and preservation. Each recommendation set begins with a detailed introduction explaining the rationale and benefits, followed by a curated list of web resources and references for deeper learning. We highly recommend these guidelines, as they combine clear language with practical implementation tools while offering a comprehensive roadmap for creating truly FAIR data.

Research Infrastructures

Research Infrastructures (RIs) play a key role in both disseminating and implementing FAIR principles. Whether established before or after the concept of “FAIR data” spread across scholarly communities, these infrastructures are guided by the same goals of enhancing the production and sharing of high-quality research data. As a result, RIs have developed various resources—from recommendations and training materials to services and tools—that help both individual scholars and institutions create and use FAIR data.

In Europe, the main Research Infrastructures working in Humanities, Cultural Heritage, and Social Sciences are ARIADNE, CLARIN, DARIAH, E-RIHS, and OPERAS. Below, we present each of them with brief references to their key outputs related to FAIR principles implementation.

ARIADNE Research Infrastructure (ARIADNE RI)

is an international non-profit organisation founded in 2022, continuing the work of ARIADNEplus and ARIADNE. With over 25 founding members, ARIADNE RI promotes digital techniques in archaeology and heritage, develops tools, creates and integrates research archives, maintains infrastructure, and supports communication. As the largest archaeological network globally, it connects repositories, heritage bodies, museums, and research institutions while fostering collaboration between archaeologists and information scientists.

Catalogue, main point of access for searching and browsing archeological datasets.
Reference model, built on CIDOC-CRM and composed of multiple formal ontologies, such as CRMarcheo.
Training hub, in particular the course “Applying open/the Fair Principles to archaeology”.
Complete list of services, including
- Data Management Plan Tool and Templates
- ARIADNEplus Lab, which also offers a Linked Open Data (GraphDB) catalogue
- Visual Media Service for easy publication and presentation on the web of complex visual media assets.

CLARIN (Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure)

is a digital infrastructure that provides language data and tools for humanities and social sciences research, including text, audio, and video resources. Established in 2012, CLARIN is European Research Infrastructure Consortium and a distributed digital infrastructure that connects European research centers and enables resource sharing across locations.

Centres providing a certified repository for data deposit including support for persistent identifiers.
Virtual Language Observatory (VLO), a user-friendly interface to search language resources across domains.
Language Resource Switchboard, online tools for finding language processing tools for your data.
Recommendations on licences.
Recommendations on formats and standards.

DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities)

is a European network supporting digital arts and humanities research by connecting people, expertise, and technologies across member countries. Established in 2014 as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium, it now has 22 Members and several Cooperating Partners. DARIAH strengthens digital humanities research by providing tools, training, and infrastructure while preserving traditional humanities approaches in the digital age.

Catalogue of tools and services.
DARIAH-Campus, a platform to access DARIAH and DARIAH-affiliated offerings in training and education.
DARIAH Teach: community-driven and multilingual learning and teaching materials.

E-RIHS (European Research Infrastructure for Heritage Science)

Initiated in 1999 and established as a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) in 2025, E-RIHS supports heritage science research in Europe. It operates on two levels, with a central hub and the national nodes, providing services and training.

Catalogue of services.
Training camps.

OPERAS (Open Scholarly Communication in the European Research Area for Social Sciences and Humanities)

is a Research Infrastructure that supports open scholarly communication in social sciences and humanities (SSH) across Europe. It coordinates resources to address scholarly communication needs of European SSH researchers, aiming to make Open Science accessible to all without barriers.

GoTriple, a multilingual platform for social sciences and humanities that centralises access to publications, data, projects, and researcher profiles from diverse sources, making them discoverable and reusable.
TRIPLE Ontologies.
TRIPLE Open Science Training Series, including “TRIPLE Training on FAIR Data in SSH”.
OPERAS Common Standards White Paper, June 2021.

Open science and the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC)

Several FAIR principles—particularly accessibility and reuse—align with open science principles. While FAIR guidelines advocate making data “as open as possible and as closed as necessary,” open science emphasizes collaborative work and comprehensive sharing of knowledge, tools, and results throughout the research process. The goal is to publish scientific outputs—from methodologies to final results—in ways that enable both access and free reuse by others. We provide references below for those wishing to explore open science further.

UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science

Leonelli, Sabina. Philosophy of Open Science. 1st edn. Cambridge University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009416368.

Finally, we briefly present the Social Sciences & Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC), an EU Horizon 2020 project uniting 47 partners to develop the SSH area of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The project includes research infrastructures—like CLARIN and DARIAH—and libraries with expertise spanning the full data lifecycle. From 2019-2022, SSHOC transformed siloed data facilities into an integrated cloud network. The infrastructure provides tools and training for researchers to access, process, analyse, enrich and compare data across repositories. SSHOC aligns with EOSC requirements to ensure service sustainability.

Two key tools provided by the SSHOC infrastructure are:

the SSH Training Discovery Toolkit, an inventory of training materials relevant for the Social Sciences and Humanities;
the SSH Open Marketplace, a discovery portal including tools, services, training materials, datasets, publications and workflows. It showcases solutions for the SSH research data life cycle and serves as an aggregator of curated resources and an entry point to EOSC.

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