• Making materials FAIR

    Making your training materials FAIR

    FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable and is a set of principles to ensure data can be shared effectively. Many open science trainers are exploring how to adapt these principles to ensure training material can be easily shared and reused. 

    The Ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR article explains the steps you can take (for further detail on these steps see the original article):


    A diagram showing the 10 steps to make training materials FAIR. These are described in the text below the image.

    Illustration from Luc Wiegers and Celia van Gelder: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3593257

    Ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR
    1. Plan to share your training materials online

    2. Improve findability of your training materials by properly describing them

    3. Give your training materials a unique identity 

    4. Register your training materials online

    5. Define access rules for your training materials

    6. Use an interoperable format for your training materials

    7. Make your training materials reusable for trainers. 

    8. Make your training materials usable for trainees. 

    9. Make your training materials contribution friendly.

    10. Keep your training materials up-to-date


    Additional resources

    There are also checklists  developed by other projects, such as the FAIRsFAIR checklist and the ARDC checklist 

    Tip! When planning for the FAIRness of your training materials, it is also important to recognize that different repositories have different submission pathways. For example, only the person uploading the document to the Zenodo repository is able to change or add to the metadata. If you are uploading on behalf of others, then check the metadata in advance to reduce the need to make changes in the future.