The FAIR Guidelines

An EU recommendation is the FAIR Guideline for Scientific Data Management and Administration, which require that scientific data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). The guidelines originate from the Force 11 community and can be applied to both open and protected data and data repositories (Wilkinson et al, 2016). They play an important role as a quality standard for the European Open Access Infrastructure (OpenAIRE).

Read the explanations by Kraft (2018) in German on the website of the German National Library of Science and Technology (TIB) (Blog Entry / PDF Handout).

The FAIR principles are briefly listed here:

To be Findable

  • F1. (Meta)Data are assigned a globally unique and eternally persistent identifier
  • F2. Data are described with rich metadata (see R1.)
  • F3. (Meta)Data are registered or indexed in a searchable resource
  • F4. Metadata specify the data identifier

To be Accessible

  • A1. (Meta)Data are retrievable by their identifier using a standardized communications protocol
  • A2. Metadata are accessible, even when the data are no longer available

To be Interoperable

  • I1. (Meta)Data use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation
  • I2. (Meta)Data used vocabularies following the FAIR principles.
  • I3. (Meta)Data include qualified references to other (meta)data

To be Reusable

  • R1. Meta(Data) have a plurality of accurate and relevant attributes