Where We’re Headed

The next phase of FAIR Station will build on what we learn from the RAMS MVP, continued technical exploration, and engagement with the field station and marine laboratory (FSML) community.

Some directions are already becoming clear. Others still need additional validation.

RAMS will remain an important implementation environment for FAIR Station.

Future work is likely to include:

• making RAMS more portable by removing UC and California-specific assumptions
• improving research output discovery and reporting
• adding APIs
• improving project and researcher workflows based on MVP findings
• making it easier for other organizations to evaluate and potentially adopt RAMS

A major FAIR Station goal is to help maintain the connection between field activity and what happens afterward.

Future work will include:

• discovering publications, datasets, and other outputs that may have resulted from station-supported research
• building a research activity graph that connects researchers, projects, places, funders, and outputs over time
• improving station attribution and reporting
• making confirmed connections available for reuse across other research systems and services

So far, discovery suggests that no single operational system will work for every station.

We are exploring several ways organizations might participate in FAIR Station:

• Adoption of RAMS for organizations that want a full, open-source operational and reservation platform, with FAIR Station capabilities built into the workflow.
• Existing system integrations for organizations that want to retain their current tools and workflows while connecting project and research information to FAIR Station through APIs, webhooks, exports, or other supported integrations.
• Lightweight form-based participation for organizations using simpler intake workflows. FAIR Station could provide a maintained, configurable form, while also supporting ways for existing WordPress, Drupal, Google Forms, and similar tools to send structured information into FAIR Station through webhooks or other lightweight integrations.

These are working hypotheses that will be tested with the community before larger implementation decisions are made. FAIR Station will aim to support as many realistic adoption pathways as possible while keeping the technical and operational burden of participation low.

FAIR Station is also exploring connections with research workspaces, data-management tools, repositories, identifier services, and other research infrastructure.

The goal is to help research information move between systems while reducing repeated data entry and making it easier to maintain connections among researchers, projects, places, and research outputs.