FAIR data principles – making data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable – have become a benchmark for good data management across research fields. But how well do these principles translate to the specific world of plant genetic resources (PGR), where digital records are closely tied to physical seed collections held across many countries?

A new study published in Frontiers in Plant Science by Catherine Hazel Aguilar, Markus Oppermann and Stephan Weise takes on this question, using EURISCO – ECPGR's catalogue of over 2.1 million accessions from 43 countries – as a test case.

The authors assessed EURISCO against a widely used international framework for measuring FAIRness. The results are encouraging in some respects: EURISCO performs well when it comes to human users finding and accessing data, thanks to its consolidated online catalogue and standardized passport data. Other areas prove harder to address, particularly making data more machine-readable and semantically linked to other resources, along with fuller identifier coverage.

Importantly, the study argues that PGR data systems face constraints – nationally distributed governance, varying institutional capacities, decades of legacy data – that generic FAIR metrics do not fully capture. Rather than pursuing exhaustive compliance for its own sake, the authors suggest a more calibrated approach, one that keeps scientific usefulness and practical fit at the centre of data governance decisions.

The full paper is available open access

Aguilar CHM, Oppermann M and Weise S (2026) FAIRness at all costs? Practical limitations in applying the FAIR principles to plant genetic resources data. Front. Plant Sci. 17:1888670. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2026.1888670