FAIRsharing

1. Resource facilitation to scientific research

a. Interoperability Resource: Briefly describe the function of the Interoperability Resource

The FAIRsharing resource provides guidance to consumers, so accelerating the discovery, selection and use of relevant data and metadata standards, databases (both knowledgebases and repositories), and data policies with confidence. FAIRsharing also helps the producers of standards and databases by increasing the visibility of their resources outside of their immediate discipline and so increasing the likelihood of reuse, adoption and citation of their resources. 

b. Scope statement: describe the scope , and the users of the resource. How is the Interoperability Resource positioned with respect to other similar Interoperability Resources ? Include the base URL and, if relevant, the introductory or “about” page URL.

FAIRsharing is an informative and educational resource that describes and interlinks community-driven standards (such as minimum reporting guidelines, terminology artifacts, models/formats and identifier schemas), databases (both knowledgebases and repositories), and data policies. FAIRsharing monitors their evolution, tracking which standards are implemented in which databases, and which resources are recommended by journal and funder data policies. 

Launched in 2011 as BioSharing, the portal initially leveraged the MIBBI project, but has since evolved, driven by user requirements. 

As of 10th July 2018, FAIRsharing has over 2352 records: 1173 standards, 1071 data repositories, 112 data policies (80 from journals and publishers and 22 from funders). However, quantity is not the end goal. The richness and accuracy of each record is our priority. 

FAIRsharing covers a unique space. It has a user base ranging from producers and consumers of standards, databases, repositories and data policies, to formal adopters (listed at: https://fairsharing.org/communities) including institutions, libraries, journal publishers, funders, infrastructure programmes, societies and other organizations. Adopters have to show a formal commitment. For examples, journals/publishers have registered and maintain their data policies in FAIRsharing to ‘see’ the connections between the databases and repositories they recommend and the standards these resources use, in order to progressively update and evolve their policies. 
FAIRsharing is already part of the UK Node and the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform. It forms part of the interoperability activity in EXCELERATE, and contributes on behalf of ELIXIR to the EOSC Pilot. FAIRsharing already interlinks records with TeSS. 

c. Resource url

https://fairsharing.org

d. Inter-organisational recognition: does the Interoperability Resource have community recognition? (e.g. demonstrated through a collaboration, geographical diversity in the source of the submissions, international diversity of delivery partners and/or funders)

Community recognition for FAIRsharing comes in many forms. 

Alongside ELIXIR, FAIRsharing collaborates with a variety of major FAIR-driven global initiatives, research and infrastructure programmes, and other resources and services, with the aim of being an interoperable component in an ecosystem of complementary services. Examples are: 1) the FAIR Metrics working group (http://fairmetrics.org): we work to guide producers of standards, databases and repositories to assess the level of FAIRness of their resource; 2) FORCE 11 (https://www.force11.org): we run a group working with its Data Citation Implementation Pilot to identify criteria and develop tools for the selection of databases and repositories; 3) GO-FAIR (http://go-fair.org): we are part of several Implementation Networks, around metabolomics, chemistry and global FAIR services; 4) RDA (https://www.rd-alliance.org): we run a working groupto define and implement a common framework for journal and publisher research data journal policies, and to connect FAIRsharing to data management plan tools; 5) NIH Data Commons (https://commonfund.nih.gov/commons): we are a functional element of a distributed FAIRness assessment tool kit.

FAIRsharing content is contributed by a variety of standard, database, repository, and data policy providers from over 100 countries, spanning all continents. 

FAIRsharing has never been directly funded, but has been embedded and sustained by a portfolio of research and infrastructure projects awarded to Prof. Sansone (from UK BBSRC, EC, IMI, NIH, Wellcome Trust and the University of Oxford).

2. Community

a. Community impact: If applicable, provide documented evidence of community impact (e.g., publication citations, API calls, projects using the resource, etc.)

These selected peer-reviewed publications show the role of FAIRsharing as an element of an NIH data annotation project (1), of the FAIR ecosystem (2), its use in FAIR metrics (3) and the wider community (5).
Musen M.A., Bean C.A., Cheung K.H., et al. The center for expanded data annotation and retrieval. J Am Med Inform Assoc. (2015).
Wilkinson M.D., Dumontier M., Aalbersberg I.J., et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data. (2016).
Wilkinson M.D., Sansone S.-A., Erik Schultes, et al. A design framework and exemplar metrics for FAIRness. Sci Data. (2018).
Sansone S.-A., McQuilton P., Rocca-Serra P. et al. FAIRsharing, a cohesive community approach to the growth in standards, repositories and policies. Nat Biotech (accepted); pre-print of initial version at bioRxiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/245183
The accepted version has 64 co-authors: operational team, core adopters, advisory board members, and/or key collaborators; stakeholders from academia, industry, funding agencies, standards organizations, infrastructure providers and scholarly publishers.

FAIRsharing also features, alongside ELIXIR, in the funder-driven “Science Europe: Presenting a Framework for Discipline-specific Research Data Management. Science Europe Guidance Document D/2018/13.324/1 (2018)” , a report around the need for common frameworks for disciplinary research data management protocols.

The FAIRsharing API is still a prototype and is only open to an handful of collaborators who help drive its development. In the past year there were 2914 calls.

b. Potential usage: Describe other systems that could use this candidate resource, but currently do not.

Identifiers.org (ELIXIR-EBI);
ELIXIR Knowledge Hub (ELIXIR-HUB); 
Data Stewardship tool (ELIXIR-NL); 
Tools and Service Registry (ELIXIR-DK);
Re3data.org;
DMPtool/DMPonline;
OpenAIRE DMP tool.

c. Outreach & support: Provide resource support publication(s)/user documentation(s) describing the Interoperability Resource (e.g. scientific journal publications, community preprints, resource user’s documentations etc.), resource dissemination plan (e.g. workshops, conference presentations), and other equal-opportunity research support (if applicable).

Other peer-reviewed publications show FAIRsharing is a community-driven creation from being the BioSharing blog, to its evolution as a broader, manually curated portal.
Field D*., Sansone S.-A*., Collis A*. et al. Megascience. 'Omics data sharing. Science. (2009).
McQuilton P., Gonzalez-Beltran A., Rocca-Serra P. et al. BioSharing: curated and crowd-sourced metadata standards, databases and data policies in the life sciences. Database (2016).

User guides and educational material are a work in progress, with key FAQs provided at: https://fairsharing.org/educational. Work to embed FAIRsharing in a number of training materials is also planned (Larcombe L, Hendricusdottir R, Attwood TK, et al. ELIXIR-UK role in bioinformatics training at the national level and across ELIXIR. F1000Res. 2017 Jun 21;6. pii: ELIXIR-952). 

FAIRsharing is regularly presented by Prof. Sansone (https://www.slideshare.net/SusannaSansone/presentations), Dr. McQuilton (https://www.slideshare.net/PeterMcQuilton/presentations) and members of the FAIRsharing team, as well as mentioned and enclosed in presentations by our adopters. Examples are: the educational webinar presented to the AMIA (American Medical Informatics Association - www.amia.org), presentations at each bi-annual RDA plenary since 2015, and several CODATA workshop on standards coordination, as well as presentations and hands-on sessions at many domain-specific events.

The team makes regular use of the @FAIRsharing_org twitter account when attending conferences, or to communicate major outputs and project milestones, as well as engage with users, if requested.

d. Dependency of other resources: How is this resource critical to the user(s)? Do other resources depend on the resource described here to provide downstream service? Please list, or provide a link to a diagram.

To foster a culture change within the research community into one where the use of standards, databases and repositories for FAIRer data is pervasive, we need to better promote the existence and value of these resources. First and foremost, we need to paint an accurate picture of the status quo. 

The community as asked for accurate information on the evolving constellation of heterogeneous standards available, not only for data and metadata reporting but in other areas too, such as identifier schema. Thousands of community-developed standards are available (across all disciplines), many of which have been created and/or implemented by several thousand data repositories. As with any other digital object, standards, databases and repositories are dynamic in nature, with a ‘life cycle’ that encompasses formulation, development and maintenance; their status in this cycle may vary depending on the level of activity of the developing group or community.

FAIRsharing plays a unique role to assist the users (producers and consumers of standards, databases, repositories and policies). Of course, this is a major undertaking, but it is a journey FAIRsharing are not doing alone. 

3. Quality of resource

a. Uptime: Average percentage uptime/month during the last 12 months, response time of the resource. In case of ontology/standards production, interval of update/release, adaptability of ontology design patterns to evolving data. Provide information where applicable: uptime of resource, software release cycle (please state week/month etc), update frequency.

Uptime: 97.66% the last 30 days, and an average of 96% the last 12 months.

Response time: 1 working day, Mon-Fri 9-5, best effort outside those times; with the exception of vacation season (usually Dec/Jan, Jul/Aug) where it can be longer, but we also announce this via twitter. 

b. Accessibility: what are resource retrieval mechanisms? Does the resource provide web-based user interface, application programmable interface (API), containers, and/or other channels? Please list resource access mechanism, provide URLs as applicable.

FAIRsharing is a web-based portal and its API is work in progress, currently accessible to collaborators to drive its specification and development.

c. Maintenance quality: Is there a maintenance SOP or plan, reflecting sustainability and scalability? Does it align with guidelines for sustainable software development? Please include a resource commitment statement (description text or URL).

FAIRsharing, as a resource, should not been seen or assessed as a reusable software container; the value is in the curated content. 

Preservation of the FAIRsharing content is partly ensured by the metadata information provided to Datacite, upon minting of a DOI for each record. This was achieved thanks to the support of the University of Oxford’s Bodleian LIbraries and the British Library. FAIRsharing data is also shared with a number of other resources. 

All FAIRsharing content is reviewed at least once a year. This is made possible, and scalable due to community involvement and the FAIRsharing record maintainer system, whereby users can update records themselves. All editing is double-checked by a FAIRsharing curator to ensure it conforms to our rigorous curation guidelines. To review every record in FAIRsharing currently takes approximately 1 month.

The development and population of FAIRsharing has never been directly funded, but it has been embedded and sustained by a portfolio of research and infrastructure projects awarded to Prof. Sansone, including funds from the NIH Data Commons.

d. Support quality: Please list support mechanisms (e.g., point of contact, request ticketing, resource’s response time where a solution is identified, etc.), and methods to collect user feedback. If available, list tutorial documentations or tutorial materials and format, including linking on the ELIXIR’s Training Portal (TeSS) (or other training platforms) where applicable.

There are a number of ways to get in contact with FAIRsharing if a user has an issue. First and foremost, we have the contact@fairsharing.org email address, which, as noted elsewhere, is closely monitored within working hours. 

Users also contact us via our twitter account and facebook page. Any notifications from here go to our central email address. 

We have a comprehensive FAQ available on the website (https://fairsharing.org/educational/) to help users around the site, as well as 'tooltip' question marks which provide an explanation of every field when a record is edited. 

There are also a number of 'Ask a question' and 'Any problems?' buttons on the website, should a user encounter an issue.

Users can also log issues/suggestions for our subject and domain ontologies via their open GitHub repository.

4. Legal framework, funding, and governance

a. Legal framework: What are the resource’s license/terms of use? Can the license facilitate Open Science? Please include the url for the license the resource uses.

The content within FAIRsharing is licensed via the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0); the SA clause enhances the open heritage and aims to create a larger open commons, ensuring the downstream users share back: https://fairsharing.org/licence 

b. Privacy/Ethics policy: If applicable, is there a publicly available privacy policy in which use and security around personal data are described (e.g. the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ELIXIR Ethics Policy, other relevant ELIXIR Policies)? Please include the url of the privacy/ethics policy, if applicable.

The FAIRsharing privacy policy is at: https://fairsharing.org/privacy. FAIRsharing does not house personal data, other than email addresses. 

We conform to the University of Oxford’s privacy guidelines and have followed the EU GDPR guidelines.

c. Funding & sustainability plan: List of funding sources supporting the resource, and sustainability plan.

FAIRsharing has never been directly funded, but has been embedded and sustained by a portfolio of research and infrastructure projects awarded to Prof. Sansone, including: BBSRC COPO Collaborative Open Plant Omics infrastructure (BB/L024101/1), EC PhenoMeNal phenome and metabolome analysis infrastructure (H2020-EU.1.4.1.3, 654241), EC MultiMot cell migration infrastructure (H2020-EU.3.1, 634107), EXCELERATE (H2020-EU.1.4.1.1, 676559), IMI IMPRiND (IMI 116060) , NIH bioCADDIE Data Discovery Index (NIH 1U24AI117966-01), NIH Data Commons (NIH 1OT3OD025459-01, NIH 1OT3OD025467-01, NIH 1OT3OD025462-01). 

Past projects that have co-funded BioSharing activities, include but are not limited to: NIH CEDAR Centre for Extended Data Annotation and Retrieval (U54 NIH BD2K AI117925), IMI eTRIKS translational research infrastructure (IMI 115446), NERC Bioinformatics Centre partnership funds, BBSRC Omics Standards (BB/E025080/1), BBSRC ISA (BB/I000917/1), BBSRC MGportal (BB/I025840/1), EC COSMOS (FP7 312941).

d. Governance: Describe the Resource’s QA/QC plan that guarantees similar quality governance to that of ELIXIR. Please link SAB members, if applicable.

FAIRsharing operates as an open working group under RDA and Force11, and it is driven by an international Advisory Board, that includes major publishers, resources providers, researchers, library science experts and informatics professionals. Current members of the board are listed at https://fairsharing.org/communities and here below:
Emma Ganley (PLOS) Co-chair
Varsha Khodiyar (NPG) Co-chair
Michael Ball (ESRC)
Theo Bloom (BMJ)
Jennifer Boyd (OUP)
Dave Carr (The Wellcome Trust and Wellcome Open Research)
Helena Cousijn (Elsevier)
Scott Edmunds (GigaScience, BGI)
Dominic Fripp (JISC)
Simon Hodson (CODATA), Co-Chair of the RDA/Force11 WG
Mike Huerta (Coordinator of Data & and Open Science Initiative, Associate Director for Programme Development at the NIH National Library of Medicine)
Rafael Jimenez (ELIXIR)
Amye Kenall (BMC)
Rebecca Lawrence (F1000), Co-Chair of the RDA/Force11 WG
Thomas Lemberger (EMBO Press)
Jennifer Lin (CrossRef)
Gabriella Rustici (ELIXIR UK Node Industry Training Sector Lead, University of Cambridge, UK)
Shelley Stall (American Geophysics Union)
Imma Subirats (Information Management Officer, FAO of the United Nations, Italy)
Marta Teperek (Data Stewardship Coordinator, TUDelft, The Netherlands)
Michael Witt (re3data; Purdue University Libraries)