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A significant challenge facing rare disease communities is finding a sufficient quantity and variety of data to develop and test disease-specific hypotheses. Here we describe an approach to data sharing in which stakeholders from the neurofibromatosis (NF) research community collaborated to develop a disease-focused data portal with the goal of supporting scientists within and outside the community as well as clinicians and patient advocates.
We outline a principled approach to data FAIRification rooted in the notions of experimental design, and whose main intent is to clarify the semantics of data matrices. Using two related metabolomics datasets associated to journal articles, we perform retrospective data and metadata curation and re-annotation, using community, open, interoperability standards. The results are semantically-anchored data matrices, deposited in public archives, which are readable by software agents for data-level queries, and which can support the reproducibility and reuse of the data underpinning the publications.
In the past decade, there has been a surge in the number of sensitive human genomic and health datasets available to researchers via Data Access Agreements (DAAs) and managed by Data Access Committees (DACs). As this form of sharing increases, so do the challenges of achieving a reasonable level of data protection, particularly in the context of international data sharing. Here, we consider how excessive variation across DAAs can hinder these goals, and suggest a core set of clauses that could prove useful in future attempts to harmonize data governance.
Climate change cannot be addressed without improving the energy efficiency of the buildings in which we live and work. The papers in this collection describe and release a series of datasets that help us understand how occupants influence and experience building energy use, both to aid future research and policy-development, and to spark wider data sharing in this important area.
A special collection on multi-omics data sharing, launched today at Scientific Data, offers to the scientific community a compendium of multi-omics datasets ready for reuse, which showcase the diversity of multi-omics projects and highlights innovative approaches for preprocessing, quality control, hosting and access.
UniProt continues to support the ongoing process of making scientific data FAIR. Here we contribute to this process with a FAIRness assessment of our UniProtKB dataset followed by a critical reflection on the challenges and future directions of the adoption and validation of the FAIR principles and metrics.
'Multi-omics' refers to a family of complex experimental designs where researchers apply more than one molecular profiling technology – capturing, for example, the genome, proteome and metabolome – across a common set of biological samples. These experiments offer a wealth of opportunities for subsequent analyses, but the size of the resulting datasets and the diversity of the study designs makes data sharing inherently challenging. In this collection, we present a series of multi-omics studies where the authors have used innovative means to maximize the accessibility and reusability of their datasets.