Being FAIR with Your Data for Yourself and Others
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The adoption of FAIR data practices has begun to pervade all scientific disciplines. Besides being essential to good scientific practice and facilitating a data generator’s ability to find, access, and ‘remember’ what was done to generate previous research, FAIR data also enables others (whether researchers, data scientists, or risk assessors/regulators) to better understand how the data was generated and reuse it to advance scientific knowledge and support toxicological assessments.
The focus of this session is to highlight successful efforts in making toxicological data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and how doing so can advance toxicological research from basic investigations to systematic reviews supporting health risk assessments and regulatory actions. This session will facilitate a broad discussion among toxicologists of how to go about making both small- and large-scale data FAIR (with specific examples), the advantages and challenges to applying FAIR data principles in toxicology, specific benefits to the internal research group, and how use of these principles in toxicology will facilitate assessing human health risks from chemical exposures. Topics to be addressed include: 1) Current efforts and resources which assist in making data FAIR; 2) the benefits to individuals and collaborations gained by making data FAIR while still protecting intellectual rights to research findings; 3) requirements for transparency by US Federal agencies and institutes; and 4) the role of professional societies in ensuring their scientific fields remain at the leading edge of trends in communicating research results. The Science Liaison Coalition, a partnership among health science organizations to which SOT is a primary member, has been considering the benefits of applying FAIR data principles for toxicological data through a series of webinars on “Big Data.” Highlights from that webinar series, a related breakout session at Future Tox V on Big Data, as well as recent efforts from other scientific societies (e.g., American Chemistry Society – ACS) will set up a panel discussion on ways that societies can form communities with collaborating partners (academic, industry, government and NGO) to foster and benefit from the various efforts aimed at embracing FAIR data principles to fuel research.