Maximising the potential of training materials through FAIRification

Dr Melissa Burke^1,2,3, Dr Jeffrey Christiansen^1,2,3, Dr Christina Hall^1,4

¹Australian BioCommons, Australia
²Research Computing Centre, The University of Queensland, Australia
³Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation, Australia
⁴Melbourne Bioinformatics, University of Melbourne, Australia

The Australian BioCommons training program includes events ranging from short webinars to multi-day workshops. These events generate a variety of training materials including slides, handouts, data, online tutorials, schedules and discussion documents which are developed and owned by volunteer trainers and facilitators from outside our own organisation. To maximise the potential of these materials, we wish to make them available to the wider community for reuse by both trainers and trainees. Sharing the materials more widely has the added benefit of improving the recognition of the valuable time and effort that volunteer trainers put into developing these materials.

Australian BioCommons training materials are typically shared with participants however we lacked a consistent approach for sharing materials with the wider community. The recent publication of the ten simple rules for making training materials FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), and our contribution to this effort, has spurred us to consider what we can do to make our materials more findable and available for (re)use by both trainees and trainers.

Here we outline our approach to cataloging our materials, assessing their FAIRness and developing a consistent mechanism for sharing and describing materials associated with Australian BioCommons events. We used the ten simple rules in combination with the ARDC FAIR self assessment tool to provide a framework for assessing FAIRness of the materials from our events. This enabled us to identify key areas for improvement and to develop a plan for sharing Australian BioCommons training materials via Zenodo.

Biography:

Dr Melissa Burke is the Training and Communications Officer for Australian BioCommons. She has many years of experience in developing and delivering face-to-face and online training in bioinformatics with Australian BioCommons and EMBL-EBI. She is an active member of international working groups on bioinformatics training and has a particular interest in FAIR training. Melissa has a PhD in Molecular Parasitology from the University of Queensland.