title: Previously: BioSharing Recommendations: data repositories, standards and policies in the life, biomedical and environmental sciences
titleType: Other
title: The FAIRsharing Registry and Recommendations: Interlinking Standards, Databases and Data Policies
Creators: name: McQuilton, Peter
name: Hodson, Simon
name: Lawrence, Rebecca
name: Sansone, Susanna-Assunta
Publisher: name: Research Data Alliance
Year: 2017

description: On 8 October 2018, the RDA BioSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards &amp; databases in life sciences Working Group was renamed to the FAIRSharing Registry: connecting data policies, standards &amp; databases RDA Working Group. This change was approved by RDA Council following interaction with RDA Technical Advisory Board and the Working Group Co-chairs. The group name change reflects the broader constituency and potential user base of the working group recommendation, which goes beyond the biosciences community. A second, extended Request for Comments on the Working Group recommendation was open from 10 October – 10 December 2018 in order to ensure that the community at large, not just the Biosciences communities, had a chance to provide feedback and comments. After the end of the Request for Comments period, the Working Group incorporated the comments and feedback received into the final version of the recommendation, published in January 2019. The previous version, together with the comments it received during the Requests for Comment period, can also be found on the Recommendations page, after the January 2019 version. **************************************** This draft report provides a summary of the problems we address and their context, along with a description of the outputs of the joint RDA/Force11 BioSharing Working Group (WG), which was approved at the 6th RDA Plenary (September 2015). This report is open for community review, a phase of the RDA Recommendation Endorsement Process. In line with the objectives, this WG has delivered the following outputs: 1. a set of recommendations to guide users and producers of databases and content standards to select and describe them, or recommend them in data policies; and 2. a curated registry, which enacts the recommendations and assists a variety of end users, through the provision of well described, interlinked, and cross-searchable records on content standards, databases and data policies. The intended target of these outputs are stakeholders in all sectors, those producing and using databases, content standards and data policies, and those who are involved in managing, serving, curating, preserving, publishing or regulating data and/or other digital objects, in particular datasets. Whether they are researchers, standard/database developers, funders, journal editors, librarians or data managers, the outputs from the BioSharing WG aim to enable end users to understand which standards and databases are mature and appropriate to their use case. By mapping the relationships between standards and the databases that implement them, or the policies that recommend them, the BioSharing registry enables them to make an informed decision as to which standard or database to use or endorse. As of 28th of March 2017, the BioSharing registry contains over 1639 manually curated and linked entries, split into over 868 database entries, over 675 data and metadata standards records, and over 96 data policy records, from journals, funders, societies and other organisations. The registry already has many adopters ranging from journal publishers, infrastructure programmes, to other organizations or projects (that in turn serve individual researchers or other stakeholders) - all use BioSharing in their activity in some way, and link back to the BioSharing portal from their webpages. A list of adopters can be found at the end of this document, with a continuously updated version on the BioSharing website. BioSharing is maintained at the University of Oxford and is an ELIXIR Interoperability Platform resource. The registry will continue to evolve - as an element within an ecosystem of services - to support and enable the FAIR principles for reproducible research and open science.