The FAIRsharing Registry and Recommendations: Interlinking Standards, Databases and Data Policies

Data sharing is essential to both the discovery and evolution of scientific practice, and the demand for rapid results and underlying data reporting is critical to the advancement of science. Expediting data sharing, however, should not happen at the expense of reusability. It is paramount that all research digital assets are FAIR, to enable reproducible research and underpin scholarly publishing. To this end, it is critical that community-developed standards1 for the identification and reporting of data and metadata, and the repositories, databases and knowledgebases that implement these standards, are easily discoverable for adoption and recommendation in data policies, and use by the community.

The recommendations laid out here provide guidance to users and producers of standards and repositories, describing how they can best select and describe these resources, and provide advice to funders and publishers on how they can best recommend these resources in their data policies. These guidelines are extracted and derived from the RDA-adopted output of the joint RDA/Force11 FAIRsharing WG.