This paper describes how implementation of data discovery and access services that comply with Virtual Observatory (VO) standards also provide compliance with the "FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship", published in 2016. The VO standards are developed by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA; http://ivoa.net)), an international collaboration of 22 nationally-organized VO projects. The IVOA was founded in 2002 to foster discovery of, and access

more »

... worldwide astronomy databases through a common set of interfaces. The goal of the IVOA from the outset was to enable seamless interoperability of open data and services; as such it was implementing what became know as FAIR principles before they were formalized. The IVOA has by now developed of a mature set of standards, and VO compliant services underpin the architectures of all major astronomy archives. Generally, IVOA standards published make data almost FAIR: of the 15 items in the breakdown of the four major FAIR principles, IVOA standards meet all but four of them (though the most recent standards, such as the VO data model, do not yet have universal deployment). The four noncompliant items are in areas that are considered out of scope for the IVOA. An example is licensing, which is left for data providers. Among the IVOA standards, the Simple Line Access Protocol (SLAP) deals with spectroscopic line lists. One of the main goals is to allow astronomers to discover, through the Virtual Observatory, archived spectra and to easily identify the observed absorption and emission lines in the spectra by queries in line list databases. SLAP was introduced at the IVOA in 2010. A more modern access protocol, with better integration in the IVOA standards, is being developed thanks to, among others, VAMDC (Virtual Atomic & Molecular Data Center) developers.