How to Update a Record
We advise all maintainers to perform an annual "health check" of their records in addition to any ad hoc updates that may be required. This section of our documentation takes you through editing each part of a FAIRsharing record, to help you complete your updates as quickly and as thoroughly as possible. Although our in-house curation team will check for any issues with the record and aim to keep it up to date, you are the expert on your resource, and therefore your contributions to the record are vital.
Remember, keeping your record up to date is important. The FAIRsharing community visits us to discover, select and use resources like yours, and having up-to-date information is vital for them to make an informed decision. Our human- and machine-readable interfaces (the website and the API, respectively) provide metadata on your resources for DMP creation and management, policymaking, FAIR assessment/evaluation and much more. Keeping your record up to date ensures that your resource is well-represented to all of our community and stakeholders!
Minimal curation requirements
FAIRsharing records contain a mixture of mandatory, recommended and optional fields. Every morning, an automated job checks all FAIRsharing records that have been modified in the last 24 hours, sending an email to that record's maintainers, editors and watchers advising them of the changes. At this point, the record is also checked for compliance with our minimal curation requirements.
If all of your record's mandatory fields are complete, your record is automatically passed to our curation team to be reviewed and approved. However, if your record is missing any mandatory fields, it will NOT be sent to the curation team to be checked. Instead, the automated email will provide you with detailed information on the fields that must be updated as well as those that we recommend that you include.
The curation team will ONLY see records where all mandatory fields have been completed. You MUST follow any instructions around mandatory fields that are sent to you by our automated systems, or your record will not be approved.
The email also includes extensive links to this gitbook documentation. Each section of our gitbook documentation also describes if a field is mandatory, recommended or optional. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions!
Who can update a record?
We invite all users to create new records for describing any standard, database or policy that is of relevance to your community. To ensure accurate representation of those resources, new records are hidden until they are checked and approved by our curation team. At that stage, if the record creator is not part of the development team for that resource they will be unlinked from the new record and an official maintainer invited.
There are three types of accounts that can modify records:
Maintainers: these are either individual or institutional user accounts that have claimed the record.
FAIRsharing Community Champions: volunteers who represent particular research domains in FAIRsharing in return for attribution and other benefits. They perform record curation, create educational material, and engage in outreach.
In-house staff: our in-house technical and curation staff will also help keep records up to date, or apply larger registry-wide changes as a result of e.g. schema updates.
Every time a record is modified, its history logs are updated and email notifications (as a daily digest) are sent to all maintainers and watchers of the record.
Updating a record
To get started editing, ensure you are logged in and then choose "Edit Record" from your record's Action Menu:
This will open up the Edit Interface for your record, such as this one shown here for the FAIRsharing record. Please note that the different portions of FAIRsharing records are represented via tabs in the Edit interface. This allows you to perform updates to your record in manageably-sized chunks, as you can work on and save the information in one tab before moving on to the next.
To continue reading about how to curate your FAIRsharing record, please go straight to our tab-by-tab documentation, starting with the General Information tab.
What's most important when updating a record?
FAIRsharing records have many different metadata fields, and most of these fields are optional because we understand that what is important to describe for your resource may not be what is important to another resource. If you're not sure which curation will make the most impact for your record, consider starting off by updating the following fields. Once you've done that, go through the rest of your record, with the help this documentation, and make any additional updates relevant to your resource.
Common metadata attributes and data processes. This information is updated from the Additional Information tab in the record edit interface. The metadata in this section is important for describing how a resource is FAIR, and the more information you can provide here the easier it is to understand its FAIRness.
Checking if your record has any broken links (especially homepage URLs) : It is crucial for our resource users to ensure that all the links in their record are valid. It doesn't help users if they come across broken links, that's not FAIR.
Checking if a contact email is available. It's important to provide an e-mail address, as this will enable us to contact you directly if a user needs information about your resource.
Links to identifier schemata. Describing how your resource makes use of persistent, unique identifiers is very helpful for the FAIRsharing community. You can do this by editing the relations to other records. See in particular our advice regarding relationships for database records.
Links to licence(s): It is important that your resource is linked to a license, if one exists, to explain how your resource data can be reused.
Links to other records of all types. Beyond the relationships to identifier schemata, any additional relationships will make the resource you're curating more discoverable (via graph traversal of the relationships) and showcase its interoperability.
Tagging your record: Add tags that most precisely describe the research area and scope of your resource to make them easier to find when searching and browsing FAIRsharing.
Citing your resource via publication(s): Are your publications in your record up to date? Do you have one or more publication in particular that should be used to cite your resource? You can mark one or more publications as the ones to use when citing your resource.
Links to organisation(s): It is important that your resource is linked to at least one "maintains" organisation.
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