This document specifies requirements for the consistent formatting and documentation of data and corresponding metadata (i.e. data describing the data and its context) in the life sciences, including biotechnology, and biomedical, as well as non-human biological research and development. It provides guidance on rendering data in the life sciences findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (F-A-I-R).

This document is applicable to manual or computational workflows that systematically capture, record or integrate data and corresponding metadata in the life sciences for other purposes.

This document provides formatting requirements for both primary experimental or procedural data obtained manually and machine derived data. This document also describes requirements for storing, sharing, accessing, interoperability and reuse of data and corresponding metadata in the life sciences.

This document specifies requirements for large quantities of data systematically obtained from automated high throughput workflows in the life sciences, as well as requirements for large-scale and small-scale data sets obtained by other life science technologies and manual data capture.

This document is applicable to many domains in biotechnology and the life sciences including, but not limited to: basic/applied research in all domains of the life sciences, and industrial, medical, agricultural, or environmental biotechnology (excluding for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes), as well as methodology-driven domains, such as genomics (including massive parallel sequencing, metagenomics, epigenomics and functional genomics), transcriptomics, translatomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, enzymology, immunochemistry, synthetic biology, systems biology, systems medicine and related fields.