Bridging the FAIR gap: transforming the long tail of supplementary data and generalist repositories

Recorded: Tuesday 14 October 2025
Title: Bridging the FAIR gap: transforming the long tail of supplementary data and generalist repositories into FAIR datasets
Presenters: Julien Gobeill, Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström

DESCRIPTION
The rapid rise in adoption of open science practices, coupled with growing mandates from publishers and funders for data to be published, has led to a dramatic increase in supplementary data files published alongside articles and generalist repository uploads. Supplementary data are now submitted with approximately 80% of publications, a substantial increase from about 40% in the early 2000s, and this “long tail of data” signifies a vast and under-exploited source of scientific information—a potential gold mine. However, the inherent heterogeneity, lack of standardisation, and often limited metadata associated with these files pose significant barriers to their discovery and reuse.

This session addresses the challenges associated with achieving increased Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIRness) for this long tail of data, focusing on textual and image-based information.

https://scidatacon.org/event/9/contri...

This is a recording from International Data Week 2025: https://internationaldataweek.org/idw...

Keep up-to-date with the latest digital research news, events, resources, career opportunities and more - subscribe to the ARDC Connect newsletter - https://ardc.edu.au/subscribe/