Towards Automating FAIR Dataset Record Deployment as a Continuous Integration Process: Use of GitHub Actions (GHA) on RDA maDMP Metadata

5 pages•Published: October 19, 2026

Miguel Ángel Sicilia Urbán, Alberto Ballesteros-Rodríguez, Elena García-Barriocanal, Marçal Mora-Cantallops and Alberto Nogales

Abstract

The FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) principles emphasise making research outputs machine-actionable and consistently maintained. This paper proposes applying Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) practices to FAIR metadata publishing by leveraging GitHub Actions (GHA) as the automation backbone. Machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs) conforming to the RDA Common Standard serve as the source of truth for dataset metadata, automatically validated against institutional quality policies and deployed to external FAIR repositories such as Zenodo and Dataverse upon each versioned release. The specific contribution is an organisational automation pattern that treats metadata publication as a software release process and positions validated GitHub repositories as a harvestable upstream layer for institutional CRIS systems. A proof-of-concept prototype shows the approach has a low technical entry barrier, provides full auditability through workflow execution logs, and enforces consistent metadata quality across all published datasets.

Keyphrases: automation, data managementy plans (dmps), fair, github actions, madmp metadata, metadata, rda

In: Pablo de Castro and Joachim Schöpfel (editors). Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems, vol 5, pages 190-194.

Links:	https://easychair.org/publications/paper/CmSs
	https://doi.org/10.29007/s9ht

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{CRIS2026:Towards_Automating_FAIR_Dataset,
  author    = {Miguel Ángel Sicilia Urbán and Alberto Ballesteros-Rodríguez and Elena García-Barriocanal and Marçal Mora-Cantallops and Alberto Nogales},
  title     = {Towards Automating FAIR Dataset Record Deployment as a Continuous Integration Process: Use of GitHub Actions (GHA) on RDA maDMP Metadata},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of 17th International Conference on Current Research Information Systems},
  editor    = {Pablo de Castro and Joachim Schöpfel},
  series    = {EPiC Series in Technology},
  volume    = {5},
  publisher = {EasyChair},
  bibsource = {EasyChair, https://easychair.org},
  issn      = {2516-2322},
  url       = {/publications/paper/CmSs},
  doi       = {10.29007/s9ht},
  pages     = {190-194},
  year      = {2026}}

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