Open data is an integral part of Open Research Europe. It enables greater transparency and reproducibility of research, trust in research results, and opportunities for collaboration.
To help authors more easily understand and comply with Open Research Europe’s open data policies, we’ve updated our data guidelines to cover everything you need to know when submitting your research.
What is open data?
The term ‘open data’ refers to sharing data that anyone can freely access, use, or share. These open data practices can also be referred to as ‘data sharing’.
For researchers, open data means freely and openly sharing any information or materials that have been collected, created, or reused as part of a research project. It can take many forms including survey results, gene sequences, archival material, photographs, software, code, neuro-images, and audio files.
All fields produce data that researchers can make openly available, from medicine and health to HSS. Look out for a blog next month where we’ll explore open data and HSS research in more detail.
Why does Open Research Europe support open data?
Choosing to publish data openly benefits not only the individual researcher, but also the wider research community and society as a whole.
By providing access to comprehensive information about data, source materials, and code, other researchers can more easily reproduce the research step-by-step. This can help to corroborate the findings and, in turn, build trust in the results.
When you enable others to replicate and validate your research, other researchers can ensure that your conclusions are built upon a firm foundation. In turn, this boosts the credibility of research and robustness within the research community and with stakeholders more widely.
Similarly, sharing data and supporting information openly provides opportunities for richer feedback during peer review. In turn, researchers can identify opportunities for collaboration with others who are interested in the data.
Open Research Europe’s open data policy
Our open data policy aims to ensure that research data is made ‘as open as possible, as closed as necessary’, which is fully aligned with the open data policies of Horizon Europe.
This means that all data and supporting materials must be shared unless there are commercial, privacy, security, or confidentiality concerns. These exceptions are detailed in the Horizon Europe Grant Agreement and should also be documented in the associated Data Management Plan. In those cases, our editorial team can support researchers to share data in a way that maintains the level of security required.
Sharing data includes several steps, including storing data in an open repository and including a data availability statement. A data availability statement provides detailed information about where data is located and how it can be accessed by others.
Updated open data, software, and code guidelines
Our updated guidelines provide a clearer framework for complying with our open data policy, making it easier for researchers to understand everything that is required when submitting. Some of the key updates are outlined below.
Understanding what is required when submitting an article
The guidelines provide a new step-by-step summary of what is needed for compliant data-sharing with Open Research Europe.
The main steps are outlined below. The guidelines also provide detailed information for each step for those who would like further support.
- Your dataset(s) must be deposited in an appropriate data repository.
- Your dataset(s) must have a license applied which allows reuse by others (CC0 or CC-BY).
- Your dataset(s) must have a persistent identifier (e.g. a DOI), allocated by a data repository.
- You must provide a data availability statement as a section at the end of your article, including elements 1-3.
- You must include a data citation and add a reference to data to your reference list.
- Your dataset(s) should not contain any sensitive information, for example in relation to human research participants.
- You should share any related software and code.
- Your dataset(s) must be useful and reusable by others, adhere to any relevant data sharing standards in your discipline, and align with the FAIR Data Principles.
- Your dataset(s) should link back to your article, if possible.
Exceptions to data-sharing policies
Some authors may require a different approach to data-sharing where there are concerns over privacy, commercial interests, security, and confidentiality.
The updated guidelines outline more clearly the exceptions to these data-sharing policies and provide further information about these cases.
Understanding FAIR data
In line with Horizon Europe policies, Open Research Europe supports the FAIR Data principles as a framework to promote the broadest reuse of research data and secure its longevity.
The FAIR data principles contribute to making research more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable and go beyond open data..
The updated guidelines provide an introduction to FAIR data and what this means for researchers, and signpost helpful external guidance for meeting these principles.
Open Research Europe-approved repositories
The updated guidelines outline a list of Open Research Europe-approved repositories for sharing data (although this is not exhaustive) to help researchers identify an appropriate location for their data.
This is split by:
- Discipline, for example HSS data, health data, environmental and ecological data, and physics data.
- Data type, for example software and source codes, neuroimages, 3-D printable models, transcripts, and genome sequences.
- General repositories, where there is no discipline-specific or data-type specific repository available.
View the updated data guidelines in full before starting your submission.
