Contributors#

FairDM treats contributor attribution and provenance as first-class concerns. This supports FAIR-aligned reuse (clear provenance and contact points) and helps research communities give credit for the work involved in collecting, processing, curating, and publishing data.

What FairDM means by “contributor”#

FairDM documentation uses two related terms:

Portal users: people and organizations who contribute to the research outputs managed in a FairDM portal (projects, datasets, samples, measurements, metadata, and curation activities).
Framework contributors: people who contribute to the FairDM framework itself (code, documentation, tests, releases).

This page focuses on portal users.

Why record contributors?#

Recording contributor information is important for both practical and ethical reasons:

Provenance and reuse: users need to understand who created, collected, processed, or curated data to assess fitness-for-purpose and to contact the right person.
Recognition: contributor records make invisible work (e.g., data management, curation, field collection) visible and attributable.
Governance and accountability: teams can track who did what, when, and in what role, supporting internal auditing and compliance.

Where contributors appear#

In a typical FairDM portal, contributor information can be shown on:

Project pages: the people and organizations involved in the project and their roles.
Dataset pages: who created, curated, and maintains the dataset.
Sample pages: who collected and processed a sample.
Measurement pages: who performed, validated, or reviewed a measurement.

Exact roles and required fields can vary by portal configuration.

Identifiers and profiles#

Where available, contributor records can be linked to persistent identifiers and profiles, such as:

ORCID iDs for individuals
ROR IDs for organizations