1 Approach
1.1 What is this book about?
In short, the book focuses on the necessary elements of FAIR values, namely, Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable materials, using Quarto. This book aims familiarize the reader with Quarto, a powerful tool for crafting educational FAIR contents with hands-on examples. Our guide is not a replacement for the Quarto documentation. We don’t want to teach Quarto from A to Z, rather, we aim to orient Quarto’s capabilities towards creating teaching materials and reproducible research.
Quarto has several features that make it a perfect fit as the cornerstone for making FAIR materials. It can be easily synchronized with different platforms like Git, which is a huge advantage compared to other word processor programs like Microsoft Word.
This shareability feature is the first and arguably the most important step in creating FAIR content, that opens numerous opportunities for the scientific community, such as contributing to others’ works or computational examination of their research. The main focus of the guide is on the necessary elements of FAIR materials, concretely, for crafting educational content.
1.2 How to use this guide?
Quarto is the intersection of various tools. It is a text editor, a slide crafting tool, a website builder, and a code compiler all at once. We recommend integrating the use of Quarto with your existing material development process. For example, if you are in the middle of developing materials for your lectures, use Quarto alongside your current method of developing these materials for a small portion of the content. This approach helps you get to know Quarto better and adapt its abilities to your purpose.
1.3 How can I contribute to this book?
This book is constantly evolving and meant as a living resource, and your input can make it even better! If you spot typos, have suggestions for improvement, or want to contribute new content, we welcome your involvement! If you find a typo, an unclear explanation, have an idea for a new chapter or want to see a specific topic covered you are more than welcome to open an issue or submit a pull request in the GitHub repository of this book.