The File Check Assistant: A User-Friendly Tool for Improving Data Reusability

Supporting scientists in meeting basic data standards is essential for enabling long-term re-use. Environmental research often involves wrangling datasets that suffer from inconsistent formatting, unclear structure, or minimal metadata. These issues raise barriers to human understanding and machine readability, limiting interoperability and re-usability. We have developed a user-friendly tool to help improve quality of archived data files for future re-use. The File Check Assistant tests CSV data files for basic principles of re-usability, such as file structure and encoding, and helps guide users towards good practice. Written in R Shiny, the tool has a point-and-click user interface to reduce technical barriers to applying it to research data. This low-barrier tool that promotes FAIR data practices will be published as an app for the wider community.. Tools such as this can play a key role in supporting the curation of sustainable and re-usable research data that is machine readable and AI-ready.