FAIRness and Openness Commitments as a catalyst for cultural change in research organisations

Many research communities and disciplines undergo a transformation towards promoting, facilitating, and recognising FAIRness (Wilkinson et al., 2016; https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18) and Openness in Research Data Management (RDM) practices. These transformations require buy-in from stakeholders at multiple levels and warrant many conversations between all roles to be sustainable. One approach to facilitate  and document the requested stakeholders’ ownership is the use of so-called commitments, where public endorsements by individuals or organisations serve as a driver to normalize desirable practices and offerings. Commitments can establish a community norm, whose practices may eventually turn into standards, requirements and guarantees.

The Earth System Sciences (ESS) consortium of the German Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) programme, NFDI4Earth (https://nfdi4earth.de/), and the NFDI consortium for the agrosystems research community, FAIRagro (https://fairagro.net), take deliberate steps to initialize cultural change in the form of commitments. The NFDI4Earth and FAIRagro FAIRness and Openness Commitments (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10123880, published in September 2024; https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.14925202 from February 2025) help to start conversations about changing the way that research data is collected, created, published, used, and recognised and request institutions to engage in the implementation and operation of FAIR RDM and related services. The signature of members and representatives of the respective communities signals agreement with the goals and values of the Commitments and with the consortias’ missions, products, and services. The signatories build a community of practice that takes into account diverse expertises, roles, and user groups for a sustainable shift towards more and diversified FAIR research outputs, and increasing adoption of Open Science and Open Research principles and practices.

The Commitments consist of two matching main statements and twelve supporting statements. The main statements are: (1) We commit to advance FAIRness and Openness in Earth System Science/Agricultural Sciences and beyond. (2) We value data infrastructures and data experts. The supporting statements concretise the engagement and give starting points for the implementation. Changes in the supporting statements enabled FAIRagro to incorporate community-specific aspects in its adoption of the NFDI4Earth Commitment. The NFDI4Earth and FAIRagro commitments have 8 and 7 institutional signatories, respectively, and 70 and 54 group or individual signatories, correspondingly (https://nfdi4earth.de/commitment, https://fairagro.net/en/commitment/).

In this work, we present the two Commitments and recap the process for their creation (cf. https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu23-14456), their differences, and lessons learned. We report on the interactions sparked by the Commitments with community stakeholders. We focus on the role of organisations and groups, because they are crucial to implement cultural change: they can set requirements, provide incentives for their members, and match these with supporting services and infrastructures. Specifically, we report from an exchange of experiences between representatives of institutional and group signatories from a workshop that connected institutions, created a space for open exchange, and laid a foundation for generalisable approaches.