FAIRifying a scholarly publishing service: Methodology based on the OpenEdition’s internal FAIR audit

Abstract

The FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) constitute a guide whose aim is to improve the management of digital scholarly resources. Nevertheless, the literature regarding data services other than data repositories is still scarce.OpenEdition is a digital infrastructure for open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) that carried out an internal full review to assess the degree of FAIRness of its activities. The objective of this paper is to present the methodology employed by OpenEdition’s team and the recommendations for the FAIRification of a publishing system, and hence, the elements for the FAIR Publishing Toolkit. The FAIR review was conducted in three main phases: preparation, assessment, and result phase, which listed the recommendations for the FAIR principles implementation. The preparation phase gathered the available information to define the perimeter of the FAIR review. It comprised two steps: the landscape study and the exam of actual use cases. The assessment phase contextualized the FAIR principles according to the scholarly publishing context, defined the datasets to be analyzed, carried outa FAIR maturity review per dataset, and analyzed the state of the art of some important FAIR-related elements. The result phase produced the recommendations, organized as priorities and extended objectives. The priority recommendations regard persistent identifiers and licensing policies. The extended objectives focus on authors' information management, controlled vocabularies, machine-actionability, and Digital Management Plans.