On the evolving portfolio of community-standards and data sharing policies: turning challenges into new opportunities

Shared, annotated bioscience research data and methods offer new discovery opportunities and prevent unnecessary repetition of work. In the last decade, several data preservation, management, sharing policies, and plans have emerged in response to increased funding for high-throughput approaches in genomics and functional genomics science [1]. In parallel, a growing number of community-based groups have developed minimum information requirements, terminologies, models, and exchange formats to standardize their system of reporting different experiments [2], and they have worked to maximize the interoperability among these standards [3,4]. Researchers and bioinformaticians in both academic and commercial science [5], along with funding agencies and publishers, embrace the concept that standards are pivotal to enriching the annotation of the entities of interest (e.g., genes, metabolites) and the experimental steps (e.g., provenance of study materials, technology and measurement types), to ensure that shared investigations are comprehensible and (in principle) reproducible.As a consequence of this ‘general mobilization’, there are thousands of biology databases, over 300 terminologies, and more than 150 reporting guidelines, representations models, and exchange formats that are meant to help with bioscience annotation, reporting, and sharing. But how many times have you asked or have been asked questions, like: “I work with stem cells, which terminologies are applicable to my domain?” “Are there standards and tools for publishing and archiving my (meta)genomics and (meta)transcriptomics experiments? If not, what are the steps and methods to mobilize the community and develop these collaboratively?”, “My funding agency's data sharing policy recommends the use of 'established, community standards', but which ones are widely endorsed and applicable to my wheat functional genomics data?”. This inquisitive and explorative attitude is a tangible sign of the positive effect o