This document reviews best practices that:

a) respect the existing standardization efforts of life sciences research communities;

b) normalize key aspects of data description particularly at the level of the biology being studied (and shared) across the life sciences communities;

c) ensure that data are “findable” and useable by other researchers; and

d) provide guidance and metrics for assessing the applicability of a particular data sharing plan.

This document is applicable to domains in life sciences including biotechnology, genomics (including massively parallel nucleotide sequencing, metagenomics, epigenomics and functional genomics), transcriptomics, translatomics, proteomics, metabolomics, lipidomics, glycomics, enzymology, immunochemistry, life science imaging, synthetic biology, systems biology, systems medicine and related fields.