What are the FAIR principles?

FAIR is an acronym for a concept that describes in 15 principles how to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable in the best way.

For researchers, this means, among other things, the following:

Findable

• persistent identifier are assigned
• Metadata are online

Accessible

• Data are online
• restrictions are definded (where needed)

Interoperable

• data is available in appropriate file formats for long-term preservation
• standards and controlled vocabularies are used

Reusable

• rich documentation is provided
• data are assigned with clear usage licences (e.g. Creative Commons licenses)