In this month’s meeting we welcome Allyson Lister, University of Oxford, to discuss FAIRsharing and the OSTrails project. 

As FAIRsharing Content & Community Lead at the University of Oxford, Allyson has a background in data standardisation, ontologies, semantic data and integration, she is responsible for FAIRsharing content, as well as for collaborations with users and outreach across all research domains. Allyson has recently completed an EOSC Future / RDA Domain Ambassadorship (for standards, databases and policies) and is a co-chair of two RDA working groups.

Across all disciplines, there are thousands of repositories (databases and knowledge bases) and community-developed standards for (the identification, citation and reporting of) digital objects such as datasets, software, and materials.

Making the right choice is challenging, but understanding this evolving landscape is essential: standards and repositories are pillars of the FAIR Principles. FAIRsharing is a curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, interrelated to databases and data policies across all disciplines. It guides consumers to discover, select and use these resources confidently, producers to make their resources more discoverable, more widely adopted and cited, and powers third-party tools by providing trustworthy content to promote standards and databases. RDM practitioners – as well as RDM tool developers – form a core part of our community, and this presentation will provide information about FAIRsharing generally and, more specifically, how the RDM community can use it. It will also describe our upcoming work as part of the OSTrails project around machine-actionable DMPs and FAIR assessment.