Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to share a new Research Topic in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology: Showcasing FAIR² Data: Unlocking the Science of Organizational Psychology.
This special issue may be of particular interest to scholars in OB, HR, and related areas who have datasets with long-term scientific value: employee surveys, psychometric assessments, item banks, longitudinal field studies, intervention data, multilevel organizational datasets, leadership and team datasets, organizational justice or climate datasets, digital trace data, or other resources that could support secondary analysis, replication, meta-science, or AI-enabled research.
The issue focuses on FAIR² Data Articles. These are peer-reviewed, citable publications designed to document the dataset itself: how it was generated, structured, validated, governed, and prepared for reuse. The aim is to give scholarly credit to the often-invisible work of data creation, measurement development, documentation, and stewardship, while making high-quality OB/HR datasets easier for others to discover, interpret, cite, and build upon.
A major advantage of this format is that the FAIR² system substantially reduces the burden on authors. Rather than requiring months of manual data curation, the AI-assisted workflow can usually complete the initial dataset import and structuring process with roughly half a day of author time, assuming the dataset and basic documentation are reasonably organized. The system then helps generate the FAIR² outputs, which authors review and approve before submission.
FAIR² builds on the standard FAIR principles-Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable-while adding emphasis on AI-readiness, ethical alignment, and rich contextual documentation. Each accepted submission is paired with outputs designed to support transparency and reuse, including a Data Article, FAIR² Data Portal, and structured AI-ready metadata/package.
This topic may be especially relevant for scholars working with:
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- Individual assessment and psychometrics, including validation datasets, item banks, measurement invariance, and norming resources
- Leadership, teams, decision-making, collaboration, conflict, and group dynamics
- Organizational justice, ethics, culture, climate, diversity, inclusion, and belonging
- Work motivation, performance, engagement, learning, and development
- Employee well-being, stress, burnout, occupational health, and intervention datasets
- Digital trace data, AI-related workplace datasets, and computational organizational science
Manuscript submission deadline: November 9, 2026
Research Topic / submission page:
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/78925/showcasing-fair2-data-unlocking-the-science-of-organizational-psychology
Topic Editors:
Piers Steel, University of Calgary
Salvatore Zaffina, Medical Doctor of Occupational Health, Rome
Gabriele Giorgi, European University of Rome
Topic Coordinator:
Georgia Libera Finstad, European University of Rome
Limited publication fee support may be available for selected high-impact submissions, subject to Frontiers approval. If this is relevant, please contact the editorial team at organizationalpsychology@frontiersin.org before submitting so eligibility can be discussed in advance.
I would be very happy to hear from colleagues who have datasets that might fit this format, especially datasets that deserve broader visibility and use beyond a single article. In many cases, the question is not whether the dataset is worth publishing, but whether it can be made findable, interpretable, and reusable with a manageable amount of effort. FAIR² is designed to make that step much easier.
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Piers Steel
Professor
University of Calgary
Calgary AB
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