FAIRsharing as a community approach to standards, repositories and policies

To the Editor — Community-developed standards, such as those for the identification 1 , citation 2 and reporting 3 of data, underpin reproducible and reusable research, aid scholarly publishing, and drive both the discovery and the evolution of scientific practice. The number of these standardization efforts, driven by large organizations or at the grassroots level, has been on the rise since the early 2000s. Thousands of community-developed standards are available (across all disciplines), many of which have been created and/or implemented by several thousand data repositories. Nevertheless, their uptake by the research community has been slow and uneven mainly because investigators lack incentives to follow and adopt standards. Uptake is further compromised if standards are not promptly implemented by databases, repositories and other research tools, or endorsed by infrastructures. Furthermore, the fragmentation of community efforts results in the development of arbitrarily different, incompatible standards. In turn, this leads to standards becoming rapidly obsolete in fast-evolving research areas.