FAIR Reality Check: Cost–Benefit and Tooling for Effective Research Data Infrastructure
Join the next HMC FAIR Friday seminar event with Sebastian Hellmann and Jan Forberg from Leipzig University!
The lecture will take place on 27th March 2026,10-11 am CET in Zoom.
(For organizational reasons, we cannot guarantee participation in the event for registrations later than 09:45)
Abstract:
More than a decade after the introduction of the FAIR Principles and after billions of euros invested in research data infrastructure, a fundamental question remains: What value has FAIR actually delivered to researchers?
In this talk we take a pragmatic perspective and examine the microeconomics of FAIR adoption. Researchers constantly balance effort, cost, and administrative burden against the practical benefits they receive. We revisit lessons learned from the past decade and discuss which practices and tooling genuinely reduce friction while increasing the value of research data.
Building on this analysis, we present the design philosophy behind the open-source tools Databus and MOSS, developed in the DBpedia ecosystem. These tools enable organizations to build distributed data catalogs with collaborative metadata annotations and tailored search capabilities, aiming to provide tangible value to researchers while keeping the effort required for FAIR data management as low as possible. In addition, both systems are designed to be increasingly operable and maintainable by AI agents, enabling automated metadata curation, catalog management, and dataset integration workflows.
The presentation is aimed at research infrastructure administrators, data stewards, and platform maintainers who are responsible for implementing FAIR systems that genuinely support researchers rather than adding additional complexity.
Background Information:
The Helmholtz Metadata Collaboration (HMC) invites you to engage in an exciting series of talks on FAIR Data through the HMC FAIR Friday lecture series. Renowned experts from around the world will present key aspects of FAIR data, offering deep dives into the topic and sparking discussions on best practices and new perspectives. HMC FAIR Friday is aimed at professionals in research data management as well as researchers from all disciplines of the Helmholtz Association and beyond, who want to learn more about the importance and implementation of FAIR principles.
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