To join RARe, a CRB must meet the conditions set out in the membership charter

RARE is France’s leading infrastructure for securing, documenting, and distributing resources from the Earth system’s biosphere. It brings together five networks—known as “pillars”—of Biological Resource Centers (CRBs) that conserve genetic, genomic, and biological resources collected and characterized through research, as well as the associated data: for domestic animals and their wild relatives (animal pillar), cultivated plants and their wild relatives (plant pillar), forest trees (forest pillar), microorganisms and microbial communities (microorganism pillar), and complex matrices and organisms in the environment (environment pillar).

Join RARe, the French network of biological resource centers for research in biology, agronomy, and the environment

To improve the visibility of the biological resources housed by the CRBs that comprise it and facilitate their use for research and innovation, both nationally and internationally

To help CRBs improve their operations, the management of the resources under their care, and the services they offer to the scientific community.

Ensuring access to traceable biological samples that are relevant to the scientific question at hand is fundamental to achieving reliable and reproducible results. By professionalizing the CRBs, RARe aims to build confidence among researchers who generate or use results derived from CRB resources. Conversely, securing samples and associated data from research projects is equally important—both to establish benchmarks for future research and to facilitate the reuse of samples, the collection of which remains costly.

Beyond data sharing, the challenge is to encourage the sharing of biological resources, and to do so by documenting them as thoroughly as possible to facilitate their reuse.

Meeting Membership Criteria

Areas of activity

To join the infrastructure, a biological resource center must fulfill the following missions: collection, processing, characterization, security, and distribution of biological material.
It must have clear rules governing the distribution of samples.
The area of activity must involve species not yet represented in RARe and demonstrate proven research value.
Collections of biological material may include any type of material, but the presence of material containing a functional unit of heredity (DNA, RNA, cells, tissue, etc.) is required. A combination of several types of biological material is desirable.

Membership Requirements

The applicant organization must hold a CRB certification issued by GIS IBISA, or be certified to a standard such as ISO 9001.

If this is not the case, the various RARe working groups (WG)—Access and Benefit-Sharing, Economic Model, Communication, Information Systems, Social and Environmental Responsibility, and Quality Management—can assist the organization in working toward certification or accreditation. This assistance generally cannot last more than three years; an internal audit of the organization’s commitment, human resources, and financial resources may be conducted at the end of this period to identify the factor(s) hindering progress toward certification or accreditation and to determine whether RARe should continue providing assistance to the applicant organization.

In all cases, the applicant organization must demonstrate that it verifies consent to provide the sample in accordance with the Framework Law on Biodiversity—Title IV.

Commitment

New participants agree to work in solidarity with the other members. This entails:

• being familiar with and complying with the infrastructure’s internal regulations and any updates thereto;
• providing the data and metadata on the collections required by the infrastructure’s web portal;
• following the common procedure for processing entry or exit requests submitted via the web portal;
• participating in the joint process for developing pricing policies;
• participating in scientific events organized by the infrastructure, such as seminars and publications.

Membership Procedures

The infrastructure’s Steering Committee evaluates the eligibility of the membership application based on the information provided by the CRB (certification, accreditation, operations, etc.).

The applicant organization must submit its application in writing and commit to complying with all provisions of the charter. Financially, the applicant organization must outline its budgetary operations. The rules governing access to the infrastructure’s funding must be detailed prior to membership.