4. Relevance of FAIR Principles to Your Own Research

Why is FAIR Data Important? 

Given our reliance on digital data, it’s increasingly important to make data as FAIR as possible. In a nutshell, employing the FAIR principles makes data more valuable by improving its findability through unique identifiers and allowing for easier combination and integration. These principles make data easier to reuse and share (Yankulov, 2020) and increase the longevity of the data. Additionally, by making your data FAIR and accessible to other researchers, you are improving transparency of your research and increasing knowledge synthesis efforts (How to Make the Data FAIR, n.d.).

Making research data readily available for humans and machines enables new discoveries, can create new collaborations, enables verification of results, and reduces research duplication. 

Making research data FAIR can provide a range of advantages to researchers including: 

• Achieving maximum impact from research. 
• Increasing the visibility and citations of research. 
• Improving the reproducibility and reliability of research. 
• Attracting new partnerships with researchers and policy and broader communities. 
• Enabling new research questions to be answered (How to Make Your Data FAIR | Universiteit Utrecht, n.d.).