This document provides an overview of FAIRsharing, an online resource that curates descriptions and relationship graphs of standards, databases, and policies. It aims to help users discover, select, and use these resources with confidence. The document discusses FAIRsharing's scope and mission, the types of resources it includes, its users and communities, and how it can help guide researchers in making their data FAIR, using the example of a librarian (Alice) helping a researcher (Bob) dealing with multi-omics data.

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discover and curate an ecosystem of research
standards and databases
ECCB 2022: FAIRification of Multi-omics Workshop
12 September 2022
@FAIRsharing_org
contact@fairsharing.org
10.25504/FAIRsharing.2abjs5
datareadiness.eng.ox.ac.uk
Allyson Lister, PhD
FAIRsharing - Content and Community Coordinator;
Senior Knowledge Engineer;
ORCiD: 0000-0002-7702-4495

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FAIRsharing in a nutshell:
scope and mission

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An informative and educational resource, and a service
FAIRsharing provides curated descriptions and relationship graphs of
standards, databases and policies in all disciplines
COMMUNITY STANDARDS
POLICIES
by funders, journals
and other organizations
DATABASES
including repositories
and knowledgebases
Identifiers
Terminologies Guidelines
Formats

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Guides consumers to discover, select and use these resources with confidence
Helps producers to make their resources more visible, more widely adopted and cited
Promoting use and value of databases, standards, policies
Total of
over 3700
resources
(Sep 2022)
repositories
standards
policie
s

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Users, adopters, communities and working groups
Including:
An endorsed output of the
FAIRsharing WG
(since 2015):
A WG (since 2015) in:
Researchers in academia,
industry and government
Developers & curators of
resources and tools
Research data facilitators,
librarians, trainers
Society, unions
and community alliances
Journal publishers and
organisations with data policies
Funders and data
policy makers
A recommended resource in EOSC reports
Used by all stakeholder groups
https://fairsharing.org/communities

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A multi-omics use case
https://fairsharing.gitbook.io/fairsharing/how-to/unsure-where-to-start

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
https://www.pexels.com/search/scientists/

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
https://unsplash.com/photos/lLrZy195sIU

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
Let's imagine that we have
● Alice, a university librarian tasked with a variety of data support roles for her
university; and
● Bob, a research associate focused on multi-omics data.
Bob has come to Alice because his funder (the ERC) has requested that all data from his
upcoming project should be FAIR, and he’s not sure how to get started.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
Over the course of their meetings, Alice spends some time showing Bob various ways in
which he can find the most appropriate standards and databases for his data type. She
describes how FAIRsharing can help him:
● identify databases to deposit his data or find existing data relevant to his work;
● identify standards to describe and report his data, so that is more understandable,
reusable and reproducible;
● discover if data policies journal publishers, funders and other data policies
recommend specific databases and standards.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob: A New (Policy) Hope
Bob explains that he is thinking of exploring his funder's data policy in more depth, and
also looking to discover useful resources in his domain that might not be explicitly listed
by the funder.
Alice explains that the first step for a researcher who has a policy they should conform to
should see if that policy is listed in FAIRsharing. They use the FAIRsharing Search tool to
find the ERC policy.
Search: https://fairsharing.gitbook.io/fairsharing/how-to/search
ERC Policy in FAIRsharing: https://doi.org/10.25504/FAIRsharing.iKa3Xm

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
This allows them to e.g.
● review the policy
metadata
● contact the maintainer
of the policy, if
required
● access the policy itself,
should they need to
refer to it.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
More importantly, all named
databases, standards and
policies that have been
explicitly recommended by
the policy are listed in the
relationships further down
the page, and accessible
through the relation graph.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
Alice and Bob can now
explore the databases listed
in this policy, and use the
metadata available in each
of the records to determine
the best place for Bob's
data.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob: The (Database) Strikes Back
Remember that FAIRsharing can reproduce explicitly-named recommendations within its
graphs of relationships.
Often, policies have a “catch-all” section stating, for example, that any FAIR-enabling
resource can be used. Alice points to the part of the ERC policy that states:
When looking for a repository for research data, grantees should first check whether there is a thematic/community database where
the data could be archived. [...] A curated resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies can
be found at FAIRsharing.
https://erc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/document/file/ERC_info_document-Open_Research_Data_and_Data_Management_Plans.pdf
So, are there other resources out there that Bob should be aware of?

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
Alice and Bob start
searching based on Bob's
research domain
(multi-omics). They use
the FAIRsharing subject
browser to drill down to
the 'Omics' part of the
FAIRsharing subject
hierarchy.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
From this summary, Alice
and Bob can click through
to the full search results
for this subject area.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
All records tagged with
the word 'Omics' or any
of its child terms are
retrieved and displayed
for further filtering.
Result sets can be filtered
(e.g. limit the search
results to databases with
a 'ready' status) and
downloaded for further
evaluation.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
So, Alice and Bob have a wide variety of resources that have been developed for
particular types of Omics research data.
Are there any further requirements that they might have that could further refine these
results? Let's see how standards implemented by these databases can help inform Bob's
decision.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob: Return of the Standards
As an expert in multi-omics research,
Bob is aware that there are a number of
community standards that have been
developed over the years.
So he refines his search by limiting the
results to standards with a 'ready' status
and that have the keyword 'omics'
mentioned as well as that subject tag.
Bob scans these standards, and notices
an OmicsDI XML format.

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The Adventures of Alice and Bob
The format description in
FAIRsharing looks promising, and
so he looks to the record's graph
to discover databases that
implement it.
There are a number of specialist
and generalist omics databases
that implement this format,
including OmicsDI itself.
Bob has a lot of different choices
now, and can take a look and find
the resource that best suits his
needs.

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What FAIRsharing can do for the
multi-omics community

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Tailored views for education and promotion
Collections are are branded pages that group selected standards and/or repositories
Initiatives and projects have created them for several purposes, e.g. to list resources:
URL: https://fairsharing.org/CrosswalkOfMostUsedMetadataSchemesAndGuidelines
Maintainers
Subjects
Mapped to each other
URL: https://fairsharing.org/RDACovid19WG
Maintainers
Subjects
Recommended by a community
URL: https://fairsharing.org/IVOA
Maintainers
Subjects
Developed by the community
URL: https://fairsharing.org/CDISC
Maintainers
Subjects
Developed by a SDO

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To discover and search the 230 related standards part
of the specification developed by the
ISO Technical Committee on Biotechnology Processes
URL: https://fairsharing.org/ISO20691
Researchers: knowledge graphs to complement lists
URL: https://committee.iso.org/standard/68848.html

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A growing number of FAIR-enabling Services access
FAIRsharing API, and use it as look-up and select
service for standards and repositories for:
● data management plans and guidelines
● FAIR assessment
A new, in-development Data Discovery Service, part
of ELIXIR-driven EOSC-Life and BY-COVID projects:
● register repositories’ access methodologies, e.g.
schema.org, bioschemas, OAI-PMH
● enable (meta)data harvesting
Services: curated content to power 3rd party tools
ds-wizard.org
dmponline.dcc.ac.uk
w3id.org/AmIFAIR
openaire.eu
fairshake.cloud

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1. For FAIR evaluation, DMP and other tools/services
it provides a look-up service (via the API) for standards and repositories
2. For developers and users of FAIRness tests and indicators
it provides a searchable registry to describe and discover them
3. For community, organizations and projects
it enables creation of profiles to declare and visual the standards and repositories
they use
Ways in which FAIRsharing assists others with FAIRness

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● Kyle Copas, GBIF
● Annie Elkjær Ørum-Kristensen, GBIF
● Malin Sandström, INCF
Stakeholder Advisors
● Amye Kenall, VP of Publishing and Product, Research Square
● Adam Leary, Oxford University Press
● Catriona MacCallum, Hindawi
● Dagmar Meyer, European Research Council, Executive Agency
● Dominic Fripp, JISC, UK
● Emma Ganley, Protocols.io
● Geraldine Clement-Stoneham, Medical Research Council
● Helena Cousijn, DataCite
● Iain Hrynaszkiewicz, PLoS
● Imma Subirats, FAO of the United Nations
● Kiera McNiece, Cambridge University Press
● Luiz Olavo Bonino, GO-FAIR
● Marina Soares E Silva and Sarah Callaghan, Elsevier
● Michael Ball, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
● Mike Huerta, NIH National Library of Medicine
● Molly Cranston and Guillaume Wright, F1000Research
● Nick Everitt and Matthew Cannon, Taylor and Francis
● Scott Edmunds, GigaScience, Oxford University Press
● Simon Hodson, CODATA
● Theo Bloom, British Medical Journal
● Thomas Lemberger, EMBO Press
● Wei-Mun Chan, eLife
● Sowmya Swaminathan, Springer Nature
Current Operational Team
● Allyson Lister, Content and Community Lead
● Milo Thurston, Technical Lead
● Ramon Granell, Data Enrichment & Quality Manager
● Delphine Dauga, Data Curator Manager
● Prakhyat Gailani, Web Developer
● Dominique Batista, Research Software Engineer
● Philippe Rocca-Serra, Co-Founder
● Susanna-Assunta Sansone, PI and Founder
● and many collaborators and contributors!
Executive Advisors
● Varsha Khodiyar, HDRUK
● David Carr, Independent expert
● Chris Graf, Springer Nature
● Marta Teperek, Data Stewardship Coordinator, TUDelft
● Robert Hanisch, Director, NIST Office of Data & Informatics
● Peter McQuilton, FAIRsharing Founding Member, GSK
● Lindsey Anderson, PNNL
● Joe Miller, GBIF
Thank you!
Early Adopter Community Curators