An Ecosystem of Services for FAIR Computational Workflows

Computational workflows represent major investments of effort and expertise. As first-class, publishable research objects of their own, they are key to sharing methodological know-how for reuse, reproducibility, and transparency. Thus, the application of the FAIR Principles to workflows is inevitable to enable them to be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Making workflows FAIR reduces duplication of effort, assists in the reuse of best practice approaches and community-supported standards, and ensures that workflows as digital objects can support reproducible, robust science. FAIR workflows draw from both FAIR data and software principles, and they help ensure and support data FAIRification. The FAIR Principles emphasize the association of persistent identifiers and machine-actionable metadata with workflows. Implementing the Principles requires a framework with appropriate programmatic protocols and an accompanying ecosystem of services, tools, policies, and best practices, as well the buy-in of existing workflow systems. The European EOSC-Life Workflow Collaboratory is an example of such a digital infrastructure for the Biosciences. It includes a metadata standards framework for describing workflows that is managed and used by dedicated new FAIR workflow services and programmatic APIs for interoperability and metadata access. It includes the WorkflowHub registry and LifeMonitor workflow testing service, and it incorporates existing workflow systems and packaging solutions. Here, we introduce the FAIR Principles for workflows and connect FAIR workflows with the FAIR ecosystems they inhabit with the EOSC-Life Collaboratory as a concrete example. We also introduce other community efforts that are easing the ways that workflows are shared and reused by others, and we discuss how the variations in different workflow settings impact their FAIR perspectives.