Standardizing the format of data and metadata within a research community can provide benefits all across the lifespan of a scientific project, from specifying hypotheses and planning analyses to data sharing and long-term archiving. But most scientists are not metadata experts, and the annotations or conventions which are most useful during the scientific process may be very different from those most useful after completion.

Questions for discussion will include:

• What kinds of standardization provide the most direct benefit to individual researchers?
• What factors support or discourage adoption of a data standard by a community of researchers?
• What types of data standardization and metadata provide the most benefit for data curators, archivists, and secondary research users of a dataset?
• Where do these constraints meet? What are the highest-impact, lowest-effort steps that will both improve researchers’ own workflows and lead to FAIR-er dataset sharing in the long term?