In support of European researchers, EUDAT is developing a new FAIR registry service for scientific instruments, B2INST.
Highlighted in a recent FAIRsFAIR Implementation Story, B2INST is being developed as a community-driven solution for global and unique identification of instruments operated within science. Scientific measuring instruments, such as sensors used in environmental science, DNA sequencers used in life sciences or microscopes used in medical domains, are widespread in most fields of applied sciences.
The current plan foresees that B2INST will be offered as a public service which can be used by research communities and researchers to describe, register and reference instruments. The service is a joint development between EUDAT, DataCite and ePIC. However, there is still no official date for the launch announced yet, and there are still a number of steps before a new service is made available in the EUDAT service portfolio.
Development
It all started from the discussions ongoing in the RDA PIDINST working group session in the 14th Plenary in Helsinki in October 2019. This was at a time when the development of the metadata schema for the description of and attaching PIDs to instruments was already at a fairly advanced stage, as the working group had already been active for two years.
At that point, the working group was close to finalising the metadata standard, but an essential part in the ecosystem was missing – a service for registering and assigning PIDs to instruments. From this point onwards, the idea of developing a service for this purpose started to crystallise.
Several communities were already involved in this working group and also saw the clear need for a service like this. SURF, GWDG, DataCite and CSC are the partners co-developing the service. EUDAT CDI Technical Coordinator Mark van de Sanden has been involved in this work since the very start, since early 2020.
Find out about the development and some of the features of the upcoming service in the FAIRsFAIR project's latest implementation story, Developing the B2INST service for registering and persistently identifying instruments!
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