Adi Alter, Ex Libris

A growing number of research institutions are adopting the FAIR Guiding Data Principles for making research data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.

When research data is easily discoverable and reusable by others, knowledge advances more rapidly. Scholars are able to build on each others’ work, and the entire research community benefits as a result.

FAIR Data Guidelines

But what do FAIR data principles actually require? Here’s a summary of what the FAIR data guidelines call for according to this description from LIBER (the Association of European Research Libraries):

• To make research data findable, data and all supplementary materials should have sufficiently rich metadata and a unique and persistent identifier.
• To make data accessible, the data and its associated metadata should be understandable to humans and machines. Data should be deposited in a trusted, accessible repository.
• To ensure that data are interoperable, metadata should use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation.
• For data to be reusable, all data and collections should have clear usage licenses and should provide accurate source information.