FAIR incentives: catalyzing collective action for science and society

Abstract:

Adopting FAIR data standards offers well recognized benefits for science and society. Replicability, a cornerstone of ensuring scientific integrity, requires open access to data and methods. FAIR is also a fundamental requirement of enabling the knowledge scaffolding essential for scientific advance. Transparency in scientific data and methods inspires public trust in scientific findings and the scientific enterprise more broadly. While most scientists would agree with the value of making scientific knowledge findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible, active adoption of FAIR principles has been surprisingly slow, especially when the prevalence of digital formats have made them much easier to implement.

As an international scientific network dedicated to promoting FAIR principles and maintaining an open access repository of scientific data, CoMSES.Net (Network for Computational Modeling in Social and Ecological Sciences) has worked for more than a decade to encourage the scientific community to adopt FAIR practices. This is ultimately a collective action problem of how to successfully manage and grow a common-pool resource--scientific data--for the collective good of science and society. We can imagine a tragedy of the scientific commons, where selfish actors and intense competition diminish or destroy this knowledge resource. However, humans are in fact a cooperative species and often succeed at solving collective action problems through a range of social incentives. The growth of FAIR-aligned data repositories and data access standards attests to this ability in the scientific community.

While there may be many individual reasons for such reluctance, much falls into three categories: concerns about the intellectual and professional costs, concerns about the practical costs (e.g., time and effort), and lack of information about venues for data sharing. I discuss incentives for collective action to overcome these dimensions of adopting FAIR practices from the perspective of the experience of CoMSES.Net.