The FAIR Island Project for Place-based Open Science is an exploratory project that is comprehensively testing the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data principles in an Open Science context, aiming to apply these principles from the start of data gathering. This data gathering is initially centred on the island atoll of Tetiaroa, which is northwest of Tahiti in French Polynesia, yet offers general lessons applicable anywhere. A key goal of the FAIR Island project is the development of an exemplar place-based data policy that provides the policy framework to require researchers at the field stations to not only generate Data Management Plans (DMPs) but to share research data upon completion of their projects. This story shows how new features from DataCite can be used to automatically produce an inventory of project outputs for a field station. With this aim, the FAIR Island project illustrates how to build into research practice the interoperability between DMPs and identifier systems, which includes DOIs, RORs and ORCIDs By ensuring information contained within DMPs is ‘machine-actionable,’ this can save researchers and field station managers time on project administration and allow systems to leverage DMPs as ‘living documents’ to automatically record project outputs. The FAIR Island Project is a collaboration between the California Digital Library (CDL), University of California Gump South Pacific Research Station, Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Metadata Game Changers LLC, and DataCite. This implementation story highlights initial results and recommendations, based on a webinar for Research Data Alliance US (Robinson et al., 2021) and follow-up with the presenters.