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A Day in the Life: Open Science Personas

Personas: FDS (FAIR Data Steward), RSN (Research Software Notary), CSL (Citation Style Librarian), OAA (Open Access Advocate)

Morning: FAIR Assessment

FDS reviews a newly submitted dataset from a research team. The assessment follows the FAIR principles checklist: Is the dataset Findable (assigned a persistent identifier, indexed in a searchable catalog)? Is it Accessible (retrievable via standard protocol, with clear access conditions)? Is it Interoperable (uses shared vocabularies, references other datasets)? Is it Reusable (richly described with provenance, meets community standards)?

FDS scores each principle on a 5-point scale and produces a FAIR compliance report. Gaps are documented with specific remediation steps: "Add a DOI via Zenodo," "Convert column headers to Dublin Core metadata terms," "Add a LICENSE file to the repository."

Midday: Reproducibility and Citations

RSN examines the computational workflow that produced the dataset. Every script, notebook, and configuration file is checked for reproducibility: Are random seeds fixed? Are dependency versions pinned? Can the entire pipeline be re-executed from a clean environment? RSN creates a reproducibility manifest that lists every software dependency, hardware requirement, and execution step.

CSL manages the bibliography for the accompanying paper. Citation formats are standardized across the document -- BibTeX for the LaTeX draft, APA for the supplementary materials. CSL resolves DOIs for all referenced datasets and software packages, ensuring that every citation is machine-readable and persistent.

Afternoon: Open Access Publishing

OAA guides the team through their publication strategy. OAA evaluates repository options (Zenodo, Dryad, Figshare), license choices (CC-BY, CC0, MIT), and embargo policies. OAA ensures that the team's funder mandates are satisfied and that preprint versions are deposited in the appropriate archives.

OAA also prepares the metadata package: Dublin Core descriptors, ORCID author identifiers, and funding acknowledgment strings. The final output is a publication-ready package with data, code, documentation, and metadata that meets the requirements of the target journal and funder.

Tools Used

  • FAIR assessment rubrics from assessment_rubrics.yaml
  • KnowledgeGraph for dataset metadata modeling
  • ActionEngine for structured publication workflows
  • DOI resolution APIs

Key Outputs

  • FAIR compliance reports with remediation steps (FDS)
  • Reproducibility manifests and validation reports (RSN)
  • Standardized bibliographies with resolved DOIs (CSL)
  • Publication-ready metadata packages (OAA)