What are the FAIR Principles?

Introduction

The goal of this section is to go over each of the principles for FAIR data management as described by Wilkinson and coworkers in their Nature Springer Scientific Data manuscript published in 2016

Owing to the success of the principles, now endorsed by funding agencies (IMI, Wellcome Trust to name only two), but also by the G20 and by industry leaders, it is essential to remind the reader about those.

The FAIR Guiding Principles

The FAIR principles manuscript
the cover page for the FAIR principle article as published in Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

Fig. 1 The FAIR Principles the cover pages for the FAIR principle articles as published in Scientific Data. https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18.

Findability

To be Findable:

F1. (meta)data are assigned a globally unique and persistent identifier

F2. data are described with rich metadata (defined by R1 below)

F3. metadata clearly and explicitly include the identifier of the data it describes

F4. (meta)data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource

Accessibility

To be Accessible:

A1. (meta)data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardized communications protocol

A1.1 the protocol is open, free, and universally implementable

A1.2 the protocol allows for an authentication and authorization procedure, where necessary

A2. metadata are accessible, even when the data are no longer available

Interoperability

To be Interoperable:

I1. (meta)data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation.

I2. (meta)data use vocabularies that follow FAIR principles

I3. (meta)data include qualified references to other (meta)data

Reusability

To be Reusable:

R1. meta(data) are richly described with a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes

R1.1. (meta)data are released with a clear and accessible data usage license

R1.2. (meta)data are associated with detailed provenance

R1.3. (meta)data meet domain-relevant community standards

The FAIR principles and FAIRplus

The principles will be the organizing principle for the FAIRplus Cookbook. While the book itself can be search in various ways and its content exposed through a number of angles, personas and facets, the main Table of Content organizes a number of atomic recipes around of the principles and their associated sub themes.

Conclusions

This section should be seen as a refresher for anyone unclear about the FAIR principles. Now that key background information has been provided, shining a light on a number of ethical issues driving both the development and implementation of the FAIR principles in the context of Life Science data as well as learning about the overall FAIRification process represent a natural progression in the content of the FAIR Cookbook.

References

Reference

  1. Wilkinson, M., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. et al. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 3, 160018 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2016.18

  2. Wilkinson, M.D., Dumontier, M., Jan Aalbersberg, I. et al. Addendum: The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Sci Data 6, 6 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-019-0009-6

Authors

Authors

Name

ORCID

Affiliation

Type

ELIXIR Node

Contribution

Philippe Rocca-Serra

University of Oxford

Writing - Original Draft

Susanna-Assunta Sansone

University of Oxford

Writing - Original Draft
Introduction Reflections on the Ethical values of FAIR