Dataset Publication Standards: Community Lessons from a Multi-Stakeholder Workshop on FAIR Implementation

Ninety-seven percent of biological research identifiers (accession numbers) are published in supplementary files rather than in manuscripts. These files are usually in proprietary formats, such as Excel. This makes them invisible to standard search engines and difficult for machines to process. This ‘long tail of data’ is a critical resource for reproducibility and discovery, yet it remains hidden from researchers and curators alike. Although Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) standards exist, they have not yet been adopted and/or coordinated.

To address this issue, we organised a multi-stakeholder workshop with international experts from data repositories, publishing houses, text mining, and standards organisations, at SciDataCon 2025 in Brisbane. The solutions presented at the workshop, along with subsequent community dialogue, revealed that, while stakeholders agree on the necessary standards, key questions remain about how to implement them. Three barriers emerged: timing (should FAIRification occur during or after peer review?), governance (who enforces standards?), and incentives (who funds what?).

Our recommendations are as follows: authors should deposit datasets early; publishers should embed FAIR standards in the peer review process; repositories should harmonise metadata to enable cross-platform discovery; funders should require and support FAIR compliance.

This paper argues that implementing FAIR standards requires coordinated action across the research ecosystem with regard to technical standards, governance, incentives, and workflows.