FAIR does not equal Open

FAIR does not necessarily mean that your data is openly available to everyone. There can be reasons to restrict access to your data, for instance when this would affect the privacy of participants, intellectual property rights or commercial interests. The UG asks you to make your research data ‘as open as possible and as closed as necessary’. 

Why is FAIR data important?

If your research data is FAIR, it can be reused by fellow researchers from other institutions and disciplines. The benefits are for instance:

• Better science - others can reproduce your findings, leading to more reliable research

• Credit for your work - increased visibility and citations for your published articles and datasets

• More impact - gain maximum potential from your dataset

• Alignment with international standards and requirements of your institution and funder

• Opportunities for new partnerships with fellow researchers and the broader community

• Determine if there are reasons to restrict access to your data

• Inform participants and partners in your research

• Update your Data Management Plan when changes occur.

• Verify, enrich and complete metadata, assign persistent identifiers (DOI, ORCID, etc.)

• Use common and open file formats

• Determine how your data may be reused by others

• Link your dataset with publications, complete the Data Availability Statement

• Handle requests from researchers to access your restricted data