Helping the Consumers and Producers of Standards, Repositories and Policies to Enable FAIR Data

Peter Mcquilton,Milo Thurston,Philippe Rocca-Serra,Hugh Shanahan,Massimiliano Izzo,Oya Beyan,Susanna-Assunta Sansone,Ben Schaap,Ramon Granell,Robert Pergl,Dominique Batista,Allyson L Lister,Simon Coles

doi:10.1162/dint_a_00037

Abstract

Thousands of community-developed (meta)data guidelines, models, ontologies, schemas and formats have been created and implemented by several thousand data repositories and knowledge-bases, across all disciplines. These resources are necessary to meet government, funder and publisher expectations of greater transparency and access to and preservation of data related to research publications. This obligates researchers to ensure their data is FAIR, share their data using the appropriate standards, store their data in sustainable and community-adopted repositories, and to conform to funder and publisher data policies. FAIR data sharing also plays a key role in enabling researchers to evaluate, re-analyse and reproduce each other's work. We can map the landscape of relationships between community-adopted standards and repositories, and the journal publisher and funder data policies that recommend their use. In this paper, we show how the work of the GO-FAIR FAIR Standards, Repositories and Policies (StRePo) Implementation Network serves as a central integration and cross-fertilisation point for the reuse of FAIR standards, repositories and data policies in general. Pivotal to this effort, the FAIRsharing, an endorsed flagship resource of the Research Data Alliance that maps the landscape of relationships between community-adopted standards and repositories, and the journal publisher and funder data policies that recommend their use. Lastly, we highlight a number of activities around FAIR tools, services and educational efforts to raise awareness and encourage participation.

Highlights

Community-adopted repositories, and to conform to funder and publisher data policies
We show how the work of the GO-FAIR FAIR Standards, Repositories and Policies (StRePo) Implementation Network serves as a central integration and cross-fertilisation point for the reuse of FAIR standards, repositories and data policies in general
The FAIRsharing, an endorsed flagship resource of the Research Data Alliance that maps the landscape of relationships between community-adopted standards and repositories, and the journal publisher and funder data policies that recommend their use

Summary

MAKING THE RESEARCH DATA CYCLE FAIR

Science is constantly in flux, and (meta)data standards, databases and repositories are dynamic in nature, with a “life cycle” that encompasses creation, development, and maintenance. The community, in turn, needs to recommend their implementation (e.g. in data policies of journals, publishers, funders and other organizations) or use (e.g. to define a data management plan), in order to facilitate a high-quality, FAIR research cycle. Researchers need to identify, use and cite the standards and databases (both knowledge-bases and repositories) that exist for their data and discipline and follow the recommendations and mandatory usage as stipulated in journal publisher and funder data policies. It is important both for the efficiency and subsequent quality of the data, that researchers keep this in mind as they create a Data Management Plan (DMP) for a grant proposal or funded project. For example, is currently being developed in the Data Stewardship Wizard [7]

JOURNAL PUBLISHERS OR ORGANIZATIONS WITH DATA POLICIES

FUNDERS AND DATA POLICY MAKERS

BEYOND THE REGISTRY

CHANGE

10. BUILD: TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES

11. DATA IS IMPORTANT