"Domain Data Protocols" a key to your FAIR data

Research data management (RDM) has become a vital element to advance open science via data sharing and reuse. To improve RDM, research organisations (research funders, councils, universities, academies, institutes, etc.) increasingly require researchers to develop a Data Management Plan (DMP) for their project proposals or for research evaluations. While researchers and research projects usually recognise the benefits of better RDM, describing your standards, repositories, and data-policies in a DMP, most of the times in a non-committal way, is often considered a burden. Domain Data Protocols (DDP) are intended to make life easier for researchers as well as for research organisations demanding DMPs. They essentially give guidelines or directives for data management for a particular domain, agreed upon by a research community and/or the organisations demanding a DMP. The fact that communities collectively set the standards and guidelines for DMPs also means that there are great opportunities to increase the FAIRness of research data in these respective communities. Within EOSC-hub and the EOSC community at large, the use of Domain Data Protocols in Data Management Plans will boost the developments around FAIR data.