The FAIR Data Principles

FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The FAIR acronym was coined at a workshop in Lorentz in 2014 in recognition that much research data that was shared through the web was difficult to reuse because it wasn’t designed to be discovered or accessed and even if they were, the data were difficult to understand, combine and therefore reuse. Many data were made available in formats and using practices that do not allow computers to act on them. The Lorentz group subsequently elaborated the FAIR acronym into a set of 15 principles that provide high level guidance on how to design data so that they are findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, by both humans and machines. The principles were first published at FORCE11 in 2014, and subsequently in a Nature Scientific Data in 2016. The paper has been cited over 1000 times. FAIR has been broadly adopted by funding agencies in Europe and the United States. For more information information on the state of FAIR, visit GO-FAIR.