The Swedish Research Council publishes criteria and guidelines for how to make data FAIR

Published: 2021-11-01
The FAIR principles with icons for each letter
SangyaPundir / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)

The Swedish Research Council have produced criteria and guidelines that will make it easier to manage research data in compliance with the FAIR principles.

The FAIR principles are central to the work on open access to research data. FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. These principles are guidelines for good data management and are used to improve the possibility to find, understand, and reuse research data.

The Swedish Research Council recently published a recommendation to manage research data in a way that corresponds with the FAIR principles. The recommendation primarily concerns research that receives public funding and has data that can be made openly accessible.

To facilitate the work with FAIR, the Swedish Research Council have produced criteria for the 15 FAIR principles, as well as guidelines that can be used as support for practical implementation of the criteria.

On their website, the Swedish Research Council writes:

“The purpose of the FAIR criteria is to increase the understanding of and knowledge about what the FAIR principles mean in practice. They can be used by researchers, research funders, or to support strategic decisions in implementing FAIR in the organisation’s policies.

The guidelines are a more detailed description of the criteria, and a tool for professionals who support researchers in their planning of data management, in particular for the functions that support data management at HEIs and infrastructures, where most of the adaptation to FAIR data management and practical application of the FAIR principles takes place.” (Translation; original text found here.)