Rules of the Commons

To have their data included as part of the Farr Commons, data publishers and providers must abide by a set of rules that are concerned with:

The requirements and guidelines for the Farr Commons are a specific approach to implementing the general rules for the NIH Commons vision, which describes a core set of rules:

Rules of the NIH Commons Vision

  1. Each unique research object placed into the Commons must have a unique identifier.
  2. That unique identifier must allow the research object to be found, shared and attributed.
  3. Attribution requires associated provenance that, minimally, identifies the creator(s) of the unique research object, those that have subsequently modified it, and how it was modified.

In developing the rules of the commons we have adhered to the following guiding priciples:

Principles of the Commons

  1. Reuse don’t reinvent - where a solution to something exists within a particular domain - such as an identitfier scheme - aim to support that.
  2. Sufficiency - Ensure that the mechanisms and metadata required from researchers supports the successful citation of the data for credit and evidence, and the successful reuse of that data.
  3. Practicability/Less is more - The less that is asked of researchers to to publish their data into the commons, the more data will be published in the commons.