FAIR principles

The FAIR principles are guidelines that help to improve the machine-actionability of your data and software, while also increasing its reusability by other researchers. They hope to guide you to make your data more findable, accessible, interoperable and resuable. This page gives you a small introduction to FAIR. More detailed information can be found in the subordinating webpages.

What does FAIR entail?

Findable

Software, Data, and their associated metadata, are easy for both humans and machines to find.

Accessible

Users know how to access the data (incl. authentication & authorisation). Software, and its metadata, is retrievable via standardised protocols.

Interoperable

Data can interoperate with tools and software and be integrated with other data. Software interoperates with other software by exchanging data and/or metadata, and/or through interaction via application programming interfaces (APIs), described through standards.

Reusable

Data & Software are both usable and reusable (can be understood, modified, built upon, or incorporated into other data and/or software).

Further reading

FAIR Data

FAIR Software

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