In the last few months of 2025, curators and developers completed the addition of the System Package Data Exchange (SPDX) licence links to FAIRsharing’s existing licences. The SPDX licence list contains more than 700 licences commonly used in free and open or collaborative software, data, hardware, or documentation. Each SPDX cross-reference is linked via the SPDX logo, allowing both a direct licence link as well as to the appropriate SPDX page.
62.1% of licences listed in FAIRsharing records (2578 of the total 4151 licence relationships) now have a SPDX link.
As an example, Figure 1 shows the licences of the database figshare Plus in FAIRsharing, where five of the six licences have a link to the SPDX licence website, e.g. SPDX link of the licence CC BY 4.0 is https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html.
A concerted effort by both our curation and developer team was made to incorporate this update. Developers modified both the FAIRsharing database and front end to store and show these links, respectively. Curators matched the FAIRsharing licences with the SPDX list of licences. This matching process was performed semi-automatically: 1) the most similar matches using the licence name and homepage were found using edit distance, and 2) curators checked these matches and the whole list of licences to decide when a real match occurred.
After the initial process was performed, 68 of the existing 1071 FAIRsharing licences were matched. However, the matched licences include some of the most frequently used licences in FAIRsharing. If we consider the total number of licence relationships (e.g. figshare+ is related to six licences), 62.1% of licences listed in FAIRsharing records (2578 of the total 4151 licence relationships) now have a SPDX link.
In addition to keep the mappings up to date, periodic checks are performed to see if new matches between the licences of both repositories exist.
Find out more about licences at our Gitbook pages: https://fairsharing.gitbook.io/fairsharing/record-sections-and-fields/licences-and-support-links/licences.
This article was written by Ramon Granell and Allyson Lister.