Progress in operationalizing FAIR principles
- ILRI and Livestock CRP -
Abenet Yabowork, Harrison Njamba, Alan Orth, Jane Poole and Peter Ballantyne
CGIAR DMTF (Data Management Task Force)-OAWG (Open Access Working
Group) Joint Meeting, Naivasha, 7–9 October 2018

Progress towards Milestones
• ILRI 2017 scientist performance reviews required information
products to be in CGSpace [CGSpace output lists generated for
each scientist]
• Enhanced metadata quality and consistency checking in CGSpace
[multiple fields; draft CG Core consistency checks]
• ILRI and CRP platforms GDPR compliant, May 2018 (ILRI policy
and privacy statements approved by IMC)
• Copyright and data ownership issues included in all ILRI and CRP
legal agreements; non-disclosure agreements for sharing
confidential data; fully-operational IRB (IREC) incorporating
informed consent and privacy and confidentiality of data.
• DSpace information products ‘explorer’ dashboard version 1
developed with ICARDA (AReS) to enhance navigation and
reporting

Progress towards Milestones (numbers)
• Of 1042 information products (Livestock CRP and ILRI) published in
2017-2018 and recorded in CGSpace, 88% are open access; 97 ILRI
datasets uploaded in 2014 – 2017 to the data portal and 11 so far in
2018
• In 2017-2018, 200 (70%) of CRP information products have social
attention [Altmetric data] and 44 (13%) have ‘citations’ [Altmetric data]
• In 2017-2018, 759 (54%) of ILRI information products have social
attention [Altmetric data] and 201 (14%) have ‘citations’ [Altmetric
data]
• In 2017-2018, 600K downloads of CRP information products and 6
million downloads of ILRI information products [CGSpace data]
• CGSpace receives about 250,000 API harvesting requests per month
from Land Portal, GARDIAN, Ethiopian Agricultural Portal, CORE, other
CGIAR websites

Challenges in operationalizing FAIR
• Still waiting for final review and approval of CG Core
• CGSpace content harvesting by third parties can lead to poor-
re-use – Land Portal selective harvesting and Maceroni Bros
re-use via CRP and center websites are good models of
dialogue; AGRIS via AgroKnow very poor
• Researchers on 100% project funding don’t have much
attention for OA/OD initiatives including awareness (e.g.
research methods review at ILRI, Accenture digital strategy
assessment)
• Although many donors want open-access publications/data
and data management, still difficult to incorporate
sufficiently into budgets for projects

Strategies to address challenges in
operationalizing FAIR
• Internal OA/OD/IA task force of senior managers/scientists is
pushing this work
• Include OA-OD reviews or sign-offs into project proposal
development and end of project completion
• Enhance internal capacities by recruiting extra (temporary)
staff to focus on ‘open’ processes, actions and awareness,
with a strong emphasis on priority data needs

2018 Q4 plans
• An ongoing ILRI Research Methods review which includes
Informatics and Big Data looking at the sustainability and
options for our CKAN and database servers / systems
• Ongoing activity to make legacy A4NH and Livestock CRP and
other ILRI datasets open-access
• Include Access & Benefit Sharing (ABS) into ILRI agreements
and Research Compliance
• Further develop data collection platform to include online
cleaning, user management and automated transfer to
server/portal
• Run animal data ‘safari’ at BDP 2018 convention

This presentation is licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence.
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