FAIR Manuscript Checker

Standards anchor

Use the FAIR principles as manuscript-facing checks for research objects: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable. FAIR does not mean everything must be openly downloadable. Sensitive or restricted data can be FAIR when metadata, access conditions, identifiers, and reuse terms are explicit. The practical standard is "as open as possible, as restricted as necessary."

Core references: Wilkinson et al. (2016) for the FAIR principles, GO FAIR for the F/A/I/R subprinciples, OSF documentation for repository metadata and data archiving, FORCE11 for data citation principles, and TOP/DA-RT for manuscript transparency expectations.

Instructions

1. Inventory research objects

Before judging compliance, list every research object the manuscript depends on:

• Raw data, cleaned data, derived data, and analysis-ready data.
• Analysis code, simulation code, randomization scripts, package lockfiles, and notebooks.
• Survey instruments, treatments, vignettes, questionnaires, prompts, codebooks, classification labels, OCR prompts, and annotation guidelines.
• Figures, tables, model outputs, topic models, classifiers, trained weights, dictionaries, and corpora.
• Preregistrations, PAPs, IRB/ethics protocols, consent language, and data-use agreements.
• Third-party data or proprietary inputs that cannot be redistributed.

If an object is not shareable, it still needs metadata and a clear access or non-availability explanation.

2. Check Findable

For each research object, verify:

• Repository or landing page exists and is public or publicly discoverable.
• Persistent identifier exists or is planned: DOI, ARK, Handle, OSF registration DOI, Zenodo DOI, Dataverse DOI, ICPSR study ID, or equivalent.
• Metadata includes title, creators/contributors, description, date/version, resource type, keywords/tags, funder when relevant, related publication DOI, and related object links.
• Data/code/materials are cited in the manuscript or reference list, not only mentioned in prose.