FAIRsharing

FAIRsharing FAIRsharing is a curated, cross-disciplinary registry of data standards, databases, and policies that promotes the findability and reuse of research resources through machine-readable descriptions. The resource interfaces with initiatives such as European Molecular Biology Laboratory, National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Trust, Global Biodata Coalition and Research Data Alliance to connect standards, repositories, and publishers across life sciences and beyond. It is used by projects linked to ELIXIR, Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, World Health Organization, European Bioinformatics Institute and major publishers including Springer Nature, Elsevier, Oxford University Press.

Overview

FAIRsharing catalogs standards, repositories, and policies with metadata designed to interoperate with platforms like BioSchema, Schema.org, GitHub, ORCID, and CrossRef while aligning to principles advocated by Force11, GO FAIR, European Commission, National Science Foundation and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The registry supports machine-actionable descriptions compatible with initiatives such as FAIR principles advocates, DataCite, Knowledge Graph projects, and infrastructure programs in Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe. Users include curators from Protein Data Bank, UniProt, GenBank, ArrayExpress and policy teams at Nature Research, PLOS, BioMed Central and The Lancet.

History and Development

FAIRsharing emerged from collaborations among stakeholders in projects funded by Wellcome Trust, European Commission, National Institutes of Health, Medical Research Council, and consortia like ELIXIR and the Research Data Alliance. Early development involved partnerships with BioSharing contributors, staff formerly affiliated with European Bioinformatics Institute and advisory input from representatives of Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, GO FAIR, Force11, DataCite and publishers including Springer Nature and PLOS. Over successive phases it integrated metadata models influenced by Dublin Core, MIAME-style community standards, and schema work from Schema.org and BioSchemas. Milestones include alignment with workflows used by EMBL-EBI, adoption by repositories like Figshare and Zenodo, and incorporation into policy tracking by funders such as NIHR and Wellcome Trust.

Scope and Services

The registry provides curated records for community-developed standards (terminologies, formats, models), data repositories, and data policies relevant to projects such as Human Cell Atlas, 1000 Genomes Project, Cancer Genome Atlas, UniProtKB and Ensembl. Services include curation workflows used by institutional programs at European Molecular Biology Laboratory, machine-readable export formats compatible with JSON-LD, RDF, SPARQL endpoints, and discovery interfaces used by catalogues like ELIXIR Tools and Data Services Registry. It supports mapping between standards referenced in policy statements from Wellcome Trust, NIH Public Access Policy, and publisher checklists from Nature Research, PLOS, Elsevier. The platform interoperates with identifier systems such as DOI, ORCID, ROR, and integrates with metadata resolvers used by CrossRef and DataCite.

Governance and Funding

Governance involves advisory and operational collaboration among academic and infrastructure bodies including European Bioinformatics Institute, University of Cambridge, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, ELIXIR, and representatives from Global Biodata Coalition and Research Data Alliance. Funding sources have included grants and programmatic contracts from Wellcome Trust, European Commission Horizon 2020, UK Research and Innovation, National Institutes of Health awards, and service partnerships with publishers such as Springer Nature and PLOS. Strategic oversight has drawn on governance models similar to those used by DataCite, Dryad, ORCID, and CODATA to balance community curation, sustainability, and integration with international infrastructure roadmaps like EOSC.

Community and Impact

The registry serves communities spanning projects and organizations such as ELIXIR, EMBL-EBI, Human Cell Atlas, Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, PLOS, Nature Research, Wellcome Trust, NIH, European Commission, and numerous domain repositories including ArrayExpress, GenBank, UniProt, and Protein Data Bank. Its records inform policy adoption, repository selection, and standards development used by funders like Wellcome Trust and NIH and by publishers such as Elsevier and Springer Nature. Evaluations and endorsements have referenced practices from Force11, GO FAIR, Research Data Alliance, DataCite and community standards exemplified by MIAME and Minimum Information About a Microarray Experiment-style initiatives, demonstrating impact on metadata harmonization, reproducibility, and data stewardship across international research infrastructures.

Category:Data management Category:Research infrastructure Category:Open science