FAIR Metadata Bright Spots: Guides on the Road to Future Possibilities

Since the emergence of the World Wide Web during the late 1900's, many repositories have focused documentation efforts on data discovery to such an extent that the concepts "metadata" and "data discovery" have become inextricably intertwined in many repository practices. The FAIR Principles were proposed nearly a decade ago and have been applied in many contexts. For repositories, these principles broaden the focus from Findability to include Access, Interoperability, and Re-use. The DataCite metadata schema has over fifty metadata elements that support all four of these use cases. Repository support for these use cases in DataCite can be measured and expressed as metadata completeness. We have identified repositories that 1) are doing well in supporting these use cases and 2) have improved support during the last year. These repositories, termed bright spots, provide good examples for others and understanding their practices can help raise the bar for the new FAIR use cases.