Can you please make a badge that shows the FAIR score of a project?

[RikDTJanssen]

code state: 313764c05c221da24dd9a3da1bf73b0317038783

Can you please make a badge that shows the FAIR score of a project? Now it only shows the link to the fairsoftwarechecklist.net website. It would be nicer if the scores were in the badge.

[tom-h]

Thanks for the feedback. That's a really good suggestion, and I can see why that would be an appealing feature in terms of displaying the badge on a project page. Given my further explanations below, we'd really appreciate your thoughts on how such a feature might be implemented.

There's a tricky balance to strike in implementing such a feature. It has been a conscious design decision to avoid reducing the FAIRness to a numerical score. That's why we give a visual indication with bars, instead of a number. In each question we know the relative "FAIRness" of a set of choices. For instance, we can say that some identifiers are better than others, and all are better than none. But there's no way to talk about the relative FAIRness of the different dimensions. For instance, are persistant identifiers more important and provenance metadata?

Not only do we want to suggest that any one action is more important than another, we also have the issue that in some cases it's a binary choice and in others a scale, and in others again it's an open ended task. Underpinning the tool there are in fact decisions like this that have been made (there has to be), but then we mask these decisions by not providing a numerical score.

Linking through to the answers was also a design decision. In reusing the software, we figured it would be more useful to know the answers to specific questions (especially if comparing software for instance) than to know an overall score.

So if the badge were to indicate FAIRness, it probably couldn't be a numerical score. So far it's bars when you click through to the page. What would you suggest?

[RikDTJanssen]

Thanks for your reply. I understand your considerations. Maybe this might work:

• Show four small (stacked) bars on the badge, for F, A, I, and R? Where the length corresponds to the score. The bars go from left to right in the badge. (I don't know how to draw that in this field.)
• Or something like F: ¾; A: ¾, I: ¼; R: ¼ in the badge, where e.g. ¼ means a score of one out of four.

[tom-h]

Great, thanks for that. My preference would be for bars over numbers. And One per letter makes sense (no action against any letter can be considered more or less FAIR than any other, IMHO)