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Deirdre Winrow Post 1

• 11 November 2019, 10:29 PM

Question clarifying open vs. FAIR

Would I be right in thinking that the concept of FAIR data is more about the actual structure of the data while the concept of open data is more specifically about how it gets used?

Emma Harris

Emma Harris
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Post 2 in reply to 1

• 14 November 2019, 4:13 PM

Hi Deirdre 

Great question, so to a certain extent, yes. 

The key thing is that data can be open but not FAIR and vice versa. So you could put data files on web hosting service and it would be open in the sense that it is publicly available but since no one knows it is there, or what license applies, or what software it runs on then it is not FAIR. Likewise you could have FAIR data but in a repository that requires permissions to access.

So you are right in that FAIR is how you organise and present the data, and open is how available it is. 

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Wayne Peters Post 3 in reply to 1

• 16 December 2019, 12:16 PM

FAIR data should not be conflated with open data. Data can be open but not FAIR and vise versa. Advocates of FAIR data like to say 'as open as possible, as closed as necessary'. This is an acknowledgement that some data cannot made openly available for legal, ethical or commercial reasons. However, even sensitive data can be shared under controlled conditions (e.g. a data sharing agreement). hence the emphasis on accessibility rather than openness in the FAIR principles. Such data is FAIR when it is accompanied by machine readable metadata which provides information about provenance and the terms and conditions governing access to the data (where appropriate). Data that are made publicly available but lack sufficient metadata to enable others to discover, access, interpret and/or resuse the data are not FAIR.