Research data and their metadata should be FAIR, which stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
The fundamental principle of FAIR data is "as open as possible, as closed as necessary".
The first requirement is that both people and machines can easily find the data. Therefore, the data:
Once the data is located, the user needs to know how to access it. This includes authentication and/or information about access authorization:
Data are often integrated with other data, so they must be interoperable with other applications:
The ultimate goal of FAIR is to optimise the reusability of research data. To achieve this, it is essential that data and metadata are well defined. They must also be replicable and/or combinable with other datasets.