OSTrails Interoperability Framework – FAIR-IF: A Unified Framework for Consistently FAIRifying Research Outputs.

This is the first webinar of the OSTrails Interoperability Webinar Series, focusing on the FAIR-IF initiative, held on 28 April 2025. In this session, Mark Wilkinson (UPM, Madrid) presents how FAIR-IF aims to harmonize the behavior of FAIR assessment tools, ensuring that the choice of a tool becomes secondary to the choice of benchmarks. The vision is that FAIR assessment tools will eventually be seamlessly integrated into other environments, such as DMP authoring platforms, making their use nearly invisible to the end user. The webinar covers the overall conceptual framework for FAIR testing, detailing how a specific test relates to a Metric, how a Metric relates to a Benchmark, and how metadata about these entities can be retrieved. It also explores the current capabilities for invoking FAIR assessments at the Metric level, and outlines the plans for developing the final stage: enabling communities to author and execute their own benchmarks on digital objects. Finally, the session presents the vision for embedding actionable advice into assessment outputs, shifting the role of assessments from simple evaluation to supportive guidance.