Beyond F-UJI: reuse, sensitivity, hygiene, and FAIR-TLC

The hardware and bandwidth for this mirror is donated by dogado GmbH, the Webhosting and Full Service-Cloud Provider. Check out our Wordpress Tutorial.
If you wish to report a bug, or if you are interested in having us mirror your free-software or open-source project, please feel free to contact us at mirror[@]dogado.de.

Automated FAIR tools have well-documented blind spots. In peer review of a COVID-19 FAIR-assessment study, the reviewer (Melissa Haendel) noted that such tools reward the presence of a license, an identifier, or a metadata field without checking whether the data is actually reusable, legitimately restricted, or properly identified. rfair adds checks for exactly these.

A license can be present yet not open for reuse

Detecting that a license exists says nothing about whether you may reuse the data. license_reuse() classifies the actual permissions, and maps each license to the six-category taxonomy of the (Re)usable Data Project (Carbon et al. 2019).

license_reuse("https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/")[c("category", "rdp_category", "facilitates_reuse")]
#> $category
#> [1] "open (attribution)"
#> 
#> $rdp_category
#> [1] "permissive"
#> 
#> $facilitates_reuse
#> [1] TRUE
license_reuse("https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/")[c("category", "rdp_category", "facilitates_reuse")]
#> $category
#> [1] "restrictive (non-commercial, no-derivatives)"
#> 
#> $rdp_category
#> [1] "restrictive"
#> 
#> $facilitates_reuse
#> [1] FALSE

Only permissive licenses facilitate reuse without negotiation; CC-BY-NC-ND is present and standard, yet restrictive.

Controlled-access and sensitive data is not a FAIR failure

Data behind a data-use agreement (e.g. human/clinical data) is legitimately restricted; it should be judged on metadata richness, not open download. classify_access() flags this, drawing on the (Re)usable Data Project curations.

classify_access(access_level = "closedAccess",
                urls = "https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gap/?term=phs000424")[c("access", "controlled_access", "sensitive")]
#> $access
#> [1] "closed"
#> 
#> $controlled_access
#> [1] TRUE
#> 
#> $sensitive
#> [1] TRUE

Identifier hygiene

Layered identifiers (an identifier minted on top of another) and non-persistent identifiers reduce interoperability.

identifier_hygiene("RRID:MGI:5577054")$issues
#> [1] "Compound/layered identifier: an identifier minted on top of another (e.g. RRID:MGI:...) reduces interoperability; prefer the underlying source PID."
#> [2] "Identifier scheme not recognized; may not follow identifier best practices."
identifier_hygiene("https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8347772")$hygiene_ok
#> [1] TRUE

FAIR-TLC: Traceable, Licensed, Connected

The reviewer’s own framework extends FAIR with three principles (Haendel et al., FAIR+): data should be Traceable (provenance, attribution), Licensed (clearly and reusably), and Connected (qualified links to related entities). fair_tlc() computes these from an assessment.

a <- assess_fair("https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8347772")
fair_tlc(a)
#>   dimension                             indicator   met
#> 1 Traceable                         T1 Provenance  TRUE
#> 2 Traceable                        T2 Attribution  TRUE
#> 3  Licensed L1 Documented & minimally restrictive  TRUE
#> 4  Licensed           L2 Flowthrough transparency  TRUE
#> 5 Connected                      C1 Connectedness  TRUE

The canonical FAIR principles

For reference, the authoritative principle definitions (from the FAIR-nanopubs vocabulary used by go-fair.org):

head(fair_principles(), 4)
#>   id label category
#> 1 F1    F1        F
#> 2 F2    F2        F
#> 3 F3    F3        F
#> 4 F4    F4        F
#>                                                                        definition
#> 1             (meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier
#> 2                     data are described with rich metadata (defined by R1 below)
#> 3 metadata clearly and explicitly include the identifier of the data it describes
#> 4                   (meta)data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource
#>                                         uri
#> 1 https://w3id.org/fair/principles/terms/F1
#> 2 https://w3id.org/fair/principles/terms/F2
#> 3 https://w3id.org/fair/principles/terms/F3
#> 4 https://w3id.org/fair/principles/terms/F4

These binaries (installable software) and packages are in development.
They may not be fully stable and should be used with caution. We make no claims about them.
Health stats visible at Monitor.