FAIRsharing: working with and for the community to describe and link data standards, repositories and policies

Abstract

Community-developed standards, such as those for the identification and reporting of data, underpin reproducible and reusable research. The number of community-driven efforts has been on the rise since the early 2000s, their uptake, however, is slow and uneven. Analyzing 70 journals and publishers data policies, we find that these recommend databases and repositories 37 times more often than standards. When a reporting standard is recommended by a publisher, it is more likely to be a minimal reporting guideline than a model, format or ontology even if the latter are the machine-readable standards that underpin the utility of databases and repositories. Here, we evaluate the standards landscape, focusing on those for reporting data and metadata, and their implementation by databases and repositories; we also propose key performance indicators, and highlight the importance of developing open linked data models that instantiate these community standards. Lastly, we launch a call to action highlighting the role producers and consumers of standards and repositories must play to maximize the visibility and adoption of these resources.