Personally, my biggest concern with respect to open and/or FAIR data is that I would (try to) publish some data which I actually do not own. As a computational biophysics group, we sometimes work with experimental data, which always comes from external sources and would have to be published along with our e.g. simulated data for transparency and reproducibility.

Possible answers or workarounds suggested are:

• Start publishing those bits of the data you own for sure.
• Try to clear things up and find out who actually owns the data.
• Going up the management chain can help. If you can find someone who clearly has management over the area the dataset belongs to they can either assign an owner or give permission.
• Get someone very senior to appoint someone who can make decisions about apparently “orphaned” data.