FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship

Abstract

In 2016, the ‘FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship’1 were published in Scientific Data. The authors intended to provide guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability of digital assets. The principles emphasise machine actionability (i.e., the capacity of computational systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with none or minimal human intervention) because humans increasingly rely on computational support to deal with data as a result of the increase in volume, complexity, and creation speed of data.