NOVA SBE Library is celebrating International Open Access Week, and as you may know, we are strong advocates for Open Science. Why? because we believe that to build a world of equal opportunities, we need to have unrestricted access to knowledge, so to make the best decisions as possible in our research.
Open science has a positive impact on knowledge and science development. Moreover, there are a few and simple steps that can promote better discoverable research work and data, and to achieve this, we must apply the FAIR principles.
FAIR is the acronym that stands for (F) findable, (A) accessible, (I) interoperable and (R) re-usable.
By applying the FAIR principles to our research work and collected data, we ensure it has a unique identifier that makes it ‘findable’, for example, a DOI (Digital Object Identifier), and is accessible via a standardized communication protocol. Interoperability is the ability of computer systems or software to exchange and make use of information. So, following this principle you should use a formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for your data or metadata. And lastly, it is convenient that research data serves the purpose of being usable again by other researchers that want to build their work based on yours.
We have more information about FAIR principles and research data management.