This year marks the tenth anniversary of The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, a paper that has revolutionized Open Science and positively impacted research practices. By introducing high-level guidance, the paper has inspired a wide range of initiatives and an ever-growing community of practice that believes that research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). In the coming weeks, GO FAIR US will be highlighting the work of a select group of leaders that have rendered the FAIR principles into a movement of its own.

While the series will highlight some lesser known stories and heroes of FAIR, it is important to begin by acknowledging the many figures who made the work of the larger community possible. The FAIR principles weren’t developed in a vacuum. One of the original paper’s co-authors is Dr. Peter Wittenburg, a computer scientist who, with other research computing leaders (Dr. Fran Berman, Dr. Beth Plale, Dr. Leif Laaksonen, Dr. John Wood, Dr. Juan Bicarregui, Dr. Ross Wilkinson, Dr. Andrew Treloar), co-founded the Research Data Alliance (RDA), a bottom-up organization for community based discourse and contributions to research data. Wittenburg also joined Dr. George Strawn in co-founding the FAIR Digital Object Forum, a consortium that fosters development of the distributed dataspace.

The RDA is home to many leaders in the FAIR data movement, including the original paper’s co-author Dr. Susanna-Assunta Sansone. Sansone is Full Professor in the Department of Engineering Sciences at the University of Oxford, and co-chair of the RDA working group that produced the FAIRsharing Registry. The Registry, funded by grants awarded to Sansone (Sansone et al., 2019) curates interlinked descriptions of standards (to identify, report, and cite data and metadata), repositories (databases, knowledgebases), and journal and funder data policies across disciplines. The Registry “guides consumers to discover, select and use these resources with confidence, and producers to make their resources more visible, widely adopted and cited” (RDA, n.d.). Sansone’s work is a testament to what RDA working groups can achieve. It is worth noting the quiet work done in the background by senior leaders and administrators who make the RDA’s community of 17,000+ members run smoothly, including the current executive director, Dr. Hilary Hanahoe, and Dr. Mark Parsons before her.

Another co-author of the 2016 paper is Dr. Philip Bourne, who dedicated much of his career to making scientific data easier to share and use. As the founding dean of the University of Virginia School of Data Science, associate director at the Protein Data Bank, the first Associate Director for Data Science Officer of the NIH, and longtime biomedical researcher, Bourne believed that scientific discoveries should not remain locked away in individual laboratories or databases. One significant step in this direction was his co-founding of the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology. This was in 2005, “when open access was still considered by most scientists at best a novelty and at worst a business model doomed to failure” (Bourne et al., 2015). These examples remind us that researchers have cared about standardizing data for more impactful research for decades. 

Other accomplishments that furthered FAIR on a community level include those who focus efforts regionally and create opportunities for wider participation. One such leader is Natalie Meyers, AI researcher in residence at the Association of Research Libraries, member of GO FAIR US office,  and co-chair of the RDA’s AI Data Visitation Working Group. Among other contributions to GO FAIR US, Meyers co-authored the FAIR Data Stewardship Plan Template for Organizations and Institutions, hosted the first Metadata for Machines (M4M) workshop in the US, and was an early tester and adopter of FAIR assessment tools. She later collaborated with Rodrigo Roa, executive director of Data Observatory Foundation, to establish a FAIR data implementation strategy for Chile (Abedrapo et al., 2025) based on GO FAIR US’s template, and published a Spanish version of the FAIR Principles. Meyers’ and Roa’s collaboration points to another key feature of the FAIR data movement: it is global and inclusive.

Another key organization in the FAIR data movement is CODATA, which was established back in 1966 (Schäfer, 1968). As with the RDA, CODATA fosters many FAIR data advocates. Consider Simon Hodson, Executive Director of CODATA, who has an extensive career in research data policy and Open Science. He led the WorldFAIR project and chaired the European Commission FAIR Expert Group, where he contributed to Turning FAIR into Reality. Alongside Hodson, we find the past Secretary General of CODATA, Bonnie Carroll, who was the first Executive Secretary for two White House Science Office Interagency Working Groups—those for Digital Data and Biodiversity Informatics—and has served as Chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Section on Information, Computing and Communications, to mention only some of her accomplishments. CODATA’s Operations Manager, Hana Pergl also deserves mention. Pergl’s background is in business management and her work at ELIXIR, the European research infrastructure initiative, informed her transition into the world of science. She is a former contributor to the GO FAIR Foundation, informing a series of workshops on machine-readable metadata (Wittenburg, Pergl et al., 2019) and the FAIR Convergence Matrix (Pergl et al., 2020). And there are many more organizations promoting open research data practices, including the World Data System (an affiliated body of the International Science Council), FORCE11 and numerous large-scale initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud.

Organizations have helped consolidate the FAIR data movement, but promoting FAIR in specific scientific domains remains key for adoption. Dr. Eva Zanzerkia advanced FAIR data by bringing together geoscience and computer science researchers, government agencies, and technology experts to improve how scientific information is created, shared, and reused. She was the former director of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Geophysics program, which in partnership with NSF’s Office of Advanced Infrastructure, sponsored the community-driven initiative, EarthCube. For almost a decade, the EarthCube community has influenced research data management in the geosciences, and promoted interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Along with others at the National Science Foundation such as Dr. Raleigh Martin, Dr. Beth Plale, Dr. Melissa Cragin, Martin Halbert, and Plato Smith, much of the work in the geosciences specifically flourished through the care of their work.  

With this, we have some of the features that have given the FAIR data movement such force over the past decade: inclusiveness, community, research impact focus, leadership and history. The upcoming posts will celebrate some of these features and show how far they have already reached, setting the foundation for a successful FAIR data movement for years to come. We hope it spurs dialogue about others we may have missed, and reminds us all of the importance of recognizing and celebrating work that makes what we do possible.

Funding Acknowledgement

We gratefully acknowledge the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies (ODSET) at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID).This project has been funded in whole or in part with Federal funds from the NIAID, National Institutes of Health, under Contract No. 75N91019D00024, Task Order No. 75N91020F0022. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, Leidos Biomedical Research, Inc., or NIAID. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s).