FAIRer Resources for FAIRer Data

Today, in an open access Nature Biotechnology article, 69 authors have come together as a community, representing the core adopters, advisory board members, and/or key collaborators of the FAIRsharing resource.

They are a diverse set of stakeholders representing academia, industry, funding agencies (e.g. Wellcome Trust), standards organizations (e.g. ISO), governmental institutions (e.g. USA Food and Drug Administration) infrastructure providers (e.g. ELIXIR) and scholarly publishers (e.g. Springer Nature, Wiley, Oxford University Press).

The article shows the role FAIRsharing plays in informing and educating each group to maximize the visibility and adoption of standards, databases and repositories within their community.

Community-developed standards, such as those for the identification, citation and reporting of data, underpin reproducible and reusable research, enable data readiness, aid scholarly publishing, and drive the evolution of scientific practice. Thousands of community-developed standards are available (across all disciplines), many of which have been created and/or implemented by several thousand data repositories.

Our mission is to help consumers to accurately find, select and use standards, databases, repositories and data policies with confidence, and producers to make their resources more discoverable, widely adopted and cited

FAIRsharing maps the landscape of these heterogeneous data and metadata standards and repositories, guides users in the selection of these resources, collaborates with policy makers to facilitate their uptake, and works with developers and maintainers of these resources to foster collaboration and promote harmonization.

“We are thrilled to see the impact of our work on a diverse set of stakeholders involved in producing, managing, serving, curating, preserving, publishing or regulating data”, says Professor Susanna-Assunta Sansone, founder of FAIRsharing.

She is also a co-author of the FAIR principles, underpinning Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of the data, which are already influencing UK and European research data management policies.

Navigating through the many resources available can be discouraging and often unappealing for prospective users; often many resources are only known to those within a certain discipline, leading to reinvention and poor reuse. Peter McQuilton, who is the FAIRsharing project coordinator, says: “Our mission is to help consumers to accurately find, select and use standards, databases, repositories and data policies with confidence, and producers to make their resources more discoverable, widely adopted and cited”.

“FAIRsharing plays a central role in fostering the wider adoption of standards and repositories, by serving key information that allows journals and funders to keep their data policies up-to-date” says Philippe Rocca-Serra, co-founder of FAIRsharing and co-author of the FAIR principles.