I participated in the closing event of the FAIRsFAIR project last week. For that, I was asked to share thoughts on the status of FAIR in higher education. This is a summary of the notes that I wrote for the event. What is FAIR? First of all, The FAIR principles state that data should be: Findable: The first step in (re)using data is to find them. Metadata and data should be easy to find for both humans and computers.

Earlier today, I presented at the national open research conference Hvordan endres forskningshverdagen når åpen forskning blir den nye normalen? The conference is organized by the Norwegian Forum for Open Research and is coordinated by Universities Norway. It has been great to follow the various discussions at the conference. One observation is that very few questions the transition to Open Research. We have, finally, come to a point where openness is the new normal.

Recently, I have been engaged in an internal discussion at the University of Oslo about our institutional web pages. This has led me to realize that a university’s web pages are yet another part of what I like to think of as an Open Research “puzzle”: Cutting down on web pages The discussion started when our university’s communication department announced that they wanted to reduce the number of web pages. One way of doing that is by unpublishing a lot of pages.