Host FAIR data

The step of hosting the FAIR data includes aspects such as assigning licenses to data and publishing data and metadata. For publishing, several options exist such as setting up a web server with a database solution. For standalone datasets or datasets accompanying a scientific publication in a journal, the use of repositories lifts the burden of administrating a web server and offers at the same time many features supporting FAIR practices.

Assigning licenses

In order to foster reuse of data (or in general digital artefacts including articles, figures, etc.), license statements should be assigned to the data to ascertain the terms and conditions of reuse. The NPO Creative Commons offers a few ready-made license statements. "Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management" (Wikipedia). Examples are the CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license, allowing that anybody "can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission". That means, no copyright is assigned. Another popular option is Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) where anybody can share and adapt the data but must give appropriate credit to the licensor. Creative commons offers a selection service to choose the appropriate license.

See this document authored by Robbie Morrison on which license to choose.

Repositories for FAIR and open data hosting

Repositories are a recommended way to store data permanently. Repositories offer high-level FAIRification services and searchability of the repository which helps to increase visibility and reuse of data. See for example this article for further orientation: Scientific data Data Repository Guidance.

This page collects information on Repositories and recommendations on how to select them. A general list of repositories is here.