FAIR principles

The ERC has supported the cause of open science from its start in 2007, and continues to do so today. Open access to publications from ERC funded projects is already mandatory; the next step in the development of open science is making research data also publicly available when possible. This will benefit science by increasing the use of data and by promoting transparency and accountability. The ERC embraces the FAIR data principles: research data should be findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable. This means that data should be: identified in a persistent manner using community conventions, and described using sufficiently rich metadata; stored in such a way that they can be accessed by humans and machines; structured in such a way that they can be combined with other datasets; licensed or having terms-of-use that spell out how they can be used by others.