FAIRsharing is a resource based at the University of Oxford in the UK with an international user base, endorsed by the Research Data Alliance and a number of major scholarly publishers, funders, infrastructure initiatives and other stakeholders. FAIRsharing provides manually curated metadata records on data and metadata standards, databases, repositories and knowledge bases, journal and funder data policies and the relationships between them. FAIRsharing helps to define the indicators necessary to monitor the development, evolution and integration of standards, as well as their implementation and use in databases, and adoption in data policies by funders, journals and other organizations. FAIRsharing guides consumers to discover, select and use these resources with confidence, and enables producers to make their resources more findable, adopted and cited.

OpenAIRE works to develop tools for Open Science and has established an open and sustainable scholarly communication infrastructure responsible for the overall management, analysis, manipulation, provision, monitoring and cross-linking of all research outcomes.

This mutual effort and collaboration between OpenAIRE and FAIRsharing will ensure that this interconnected information will provide greater knowledge to researchers and other stakeholders. For example researchers will be able to discover related standards alongside the databases that implement specific standards.

As a first step, the following activities will be carried out: 

• FAIRsharing will provide OpenAIRE with access to a proportion of the manually curated database, policy, and standard metadata that FAIRsharing has across all disciplines. OpenAIRE will use this information to enrich the OpenAIRE Research Graph with FAIRsharing metadata and DOIs. 
• In turn, OpenAIRE will provide FAIRsharing with access to the OpenAIRE Research Graph and the statistics on the use of FAIRsharing within OpenAIRE. FAIRsharing will use this information to enhance FAIRsharing content.

OpenAIRE and FAIRsharing will also work together to:

• Ensure FAIRsharing is displayed as an authoritative source.
• Explore the possibility of adding new categories in the OpenAIRE Research Graph for Standards and Data Policy metadata. 
• Define methodologies for the deduplication/linkage of metadata on repositories and knowledge bases. 
• Define methodologies for the assessment of trustworthiness of metadata based on parameters.

Peter McQuilton, FAIRsharing Coordinator, says:

“We’re looking forward to working with OpenAIRE to improve repository, standard and policy metadata provision in both OpenAIRE and FAIRsharing and to continue to make these resources more FAIR”.

Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE Technical Director, says:

“The collaboration between OpenAIRE and FAIRsharing is an example of the Open Science synergies that are required to strengthen, consolidate, and enhance the actions and services in support of making research data a high-quality, reusable first-class citizen of the scholarly communication infrastructure.”

Both parties are committed to...

... helping researchers and other stakeholders understand and use data by following and implementing the FAIR principles and we look forward to seeing this common goal be strengthened through collaboration.

  More information - info[at]openaire.eu