The overarching objective of the GlySpace Alliance is to provide the scientific community with quality information on the structures of biologically relevant glycans, the glycoconjugates with which they are found, their biosynthesis, their interactions and their roles in biological processes.

Ultimately, the purpose of the GlySpace Alliance is to work collaboratively and synergistically to avoid duplication of effort, while at the same time individually developing unique and useful resources that benefit the community as a whole. In order to do so, each Member database project must be assured to be stable and accessible. Unhindered communication about data access and available resources is essential to assess the needs of the community and to most efficiently respond to these needs. The outcomes of the Alliance will benefit the glycoscience community by ensuring that the data will be sustained across the Alliance.

The Members of the GlySpace Alliance are committed to achieving these objectives by freely sharing information in the glycobiology domain, which will be facilitated by the accomplishment of the following specific goals:

1. Establish unique identifiers for glycan compositions and structures to enable the linking of related knowledge;
2. Promote the use of standards for representing and exchanging glycobiology information;
3. Develop protocols for establishing and representing the provenance of glycobiology data and acknowledgement of the individuals and groups that collect, curate, map and integrate this data;
4. Establish metrics regarding the reliability and accuracy of the data based on existing metrics for quality control (e.g., evidence ontology);
5. Reach consensus for data filtering and/or annotation when disparities are found among the data;
6. Provide globally distributed data storage redundancy to enhance data accessibility and to ensure longevity.

In order to achieve the above, membership in the Alliance requires that Members be Principal Investigators of glycan-related multi-omics data integration projects with established funding for database development, maintenance and public dissemination. Moreover, each Member must:

1. Provide data of value to the Alliance;
2. Share information regarding their data usage (e.g, access logs, etc.) to assess the needs of users;
3. Invite and respond to feedback from users in order to improve quality and usability;
4. Attend Alliance meetings either in-person or via conference calls.

All data provided by Members must be under an open-data license, CC-BY-4.0 or more permissive. Any software provided should be at least GNU General Public License v3. Finally, key data standards must be followed: for example, use of UniProtKB or RefSeq identifiers for protein sequence and GlyTouCan, identifiers for glycans. Lastly, the effectiveness of the Alliance and its Members will be reviewed annually; membership can be revoked if any Member is no longer able to satisfy all these criteria.

GlySpace Alliance Members will enlarge the depth and breadth of data and boost their dissemination within and outside the glycoscience community by inviting Partners around the world to participate in increasing the availability of data and standards for entry into the GlySpace databases and tools through their involvement in developing and sharing resources for glycan-related data analysis and knowledge.

Any database providers satisfying the above requirements may contact one of the current Members below. Membership or partnership will then be discussed at the following GlySpace Alliance Members' meeting.

Updated February 25, 2025