BioFAIR: Building a National FAIR Data Ecosystem for UK Life Sciences

We present BioFAIR: a coordinated, national effort to make UK life science data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable across disciplines, institutions, and infrastructures.  Since the vision was set out two years ago at the London Festival of Genomics, BioFAIR has moved from concept to implementation. Here we demonstrate the programme’s progress, community outcomes, and next steps as we develop the technical, cultural, and organisational foundations of a long-term FAIR ecosystem for the UK life sciences. 

BioFAIR is now established as a UKRI-funded national programme, co-creating a federated digital research infrastructure that supports FAIR data generation, stewardship, and reuse across the UK life sciences. 

Our portfolio of Pathfinder Projects is demonstrating how these elements can work in practice to solve real research and data management challenges, from genomics and phenotyping to imaging, multi-omics, and environmental bioscience. These projects are providing essential feedback loops, stress-testing emerging components, and informing the prioritisation of future development.

Beyond the technical aspects of digital infrastructure, BioFAIR is investing in the people and culture needed to make FAIR data a default part of UK bioscience. The BioFAIR Fellowship Programme is  building a distributed cohort of practitioners who bridge data science, domain expertise, and research software engineering, while also surfacing the training needs, incentives, and organisational barriers that must be addressed.

We invite the genomics and broader life science community to collaborate with us as we shape the next phase of a practical, interoperable, and sustainable FAIR data infrastructure for the UK.