TY - JOUR T1 - COPO: a metadata platform for brokering FAIR data in the life sciences JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/782771 SP - 782771 AU - Anthony Etuk AU - Felix Shaw AU - Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran AU - David Johnson AU - Marie-Angélique Laporte AU - Philippe Rocca-Serra AU - Elizabeth Arnaud AU - Medha Devare AU - Paul J Kersey AU - Susanna-Assunta Sansone AU - Robert P Davey Y1 - 2019/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/09/26/782771.abstract N2 - Scientific innovation is increasingly reliant on data and computational resources. Much of today’s life science research involves generating, processing, and reusing heterogeneous datasets that are growing exponentially in size. Demand for technical experts (data scientists and bioinformaticians) to process these data is at an all-time high, but these are not typically trained in good data management practices. That said, we have come a long way in the last decade, with funders, publishers, and researchers themselves making the case for open, interoperable data as a key component of an open science philosophy. In response, recognition of the FAIR Principles (that data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) has become commonplace. However, both technical and cultural challenges for the implementation of these principles still exist when storing, managing, analysing and disseminating both legacy and new data.COPO is a computational system that attempts to address some of these challenges by enabling scientists to describe their research objects (raw or processed data, publications, samples, images, etc.) using community-sanctioned metadata sets and vocabularies, and then use public or institutional repositories to share it with the wider scientific community. COPO encourages data generators to adhere to appropriate metadata standards when publishing research objects, using semantic terms to add meaning to them and specify relationships between them. This allows data consumers, be they people or machines, to find, aggregate, and analyse data which would otherwise be private or invisible. Building upon existing standards to push the state of the art in scientific data dissemination whilst minimising the burden of data publication and sharing.Availability COPO is entirely open source and freely available on GitHub at https://github.com/collaborative-open-plant-omics. A public instance of the platform for use by the community, as well as more information, can be found at copo-project.org.CGIARConsultative Group on International Agricultural ResearchCOPOCollaborative Open Plant OmicsFAIRFindable, Accessible, Interoperable and ReusableINSDCInternational Nucleotide Sequence Database CollaborationISAInvestigation / Study/ AssayMIAPPEMinimum Information About Plant Phenotyping ExperimentJSONJavaScript Object Notation ER -