KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Current mandates for responsible data sharing aim to make data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR), but are not always effective.
• More action may be needed to develop metadata standards that ensure research data are truly FAIR.

Data-sharing mandates aim to make research outputs more accessible to allow verification of results and further analyses.

Horizon Europe, the European Union’s programme for research and innovation funding, mandates that almost all data must be FAIR:

• Findable
• Accessible
• Interoperable
• Reusable.

Further, in August 2022, the US government announced a policy that federal-funded research articles and most underlying data should be made freely available, to be implemented by 2025.

Despite these efforts, Professor Mark A. Musen has shared concerns about the ad hoc nature of metadata and the difficulties in finding online data sets, arguing that few data sets are actually FAIR. He describes how current metadata often contain only administrative and organisational information without any useful experiment-specific descriptors, forcing researchers to search records manually, a time-consuming and often futile task.

“The research community must commit to creating discipline-specific standards for metadata and to applying them throughout the scientific enterprise.” – Professor Mark A. Musen, Professor of Medicine (Biomedical Informatics) and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, California

Prof. Musen highlights potential solutions to optimise data sharing but acknowledges that these come with certain difficulties. For example:

• Referencing data sets in published manuscripts: allows inclusion of experimental details, although data may not be deposited in a form that is easy to understand; additionally, not all manuscripts are accepted for publication.
• Technology: the CEDAR Workbench is a tool that automatically generates metadata forms to help describe particular types of biomedical experiments in a standardised way; however, the tool is only useful in scientific fields with at least basic metadata standards – something Prof. Musen believes is lacking.
• Dedicated workshops: ZonMw, a funding agency in the Netherlands, hosts workshops to develop FAIR metadata standards for its grant recipients to use; however, these workshops are costly (approximately €40,000 for the development of a single standard).

Prof. Musen concludes that FAIR data will need a huge investment and development of standards that go much further than simple mandates.

—————————————————–