A fundamental principle of modern research is that results can be replicated, verified, falsified and/or reused for other purposes. In the digital age, this means free access to research data on the Internet while respecting intellectual property rights and ethical standards.
For projects approved under the new guidelines as of January 1, 2019, the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) expects open access to Research data and similar materials collected and/or analyzed with the help of FWF funds:
- Open access is mandatory for research data on which the project’s scientific publications is based. This means all the data needed to reproduce and verify the results of the publications, including the associated metadata. This data should be published as soon as possible, and no later than together with the corresponding scientific publication. If open access to this data is not possible or only partially possible for legal, ethical, or other reasons, justification for this must be provided in the Data Management Plan (DMP) (see Research Data Management).
- Open access to all other research data from a project is at the discretion of the project leader. This includes curated data that cannot be directly attributed to a publication, or raw data, including associated metadata. In any case, such data must also be described in the DMP (see Research Data Management).
Criteria for open research data
All research data and its metadata must be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (see the FAIR Principles). The following criteria must be met:
- Institutional, discipline-specific, or interdisciplinary repositories (such as Zenodo, Dryad or Open Science Framework) may be used for archiving. The selected repositories must be listed in re3data. Repositories that have been explicitly certified (e.g., CoreTrustSeal) are also recommended as are those that meet the Criteria for the Selection of Trustworthy Repositories from Science Europe.
- The data must be deposited in such a way that it can be reused without restriction (e.g., CC BY or similar open licenses) – see How to License Research Data.
- Deposited datasets must be citable by means of a persistent identifier (e.g., DOI). See The Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles for further information.
Acknowledgment
As is standard with publications, the FWF must also be mentioned for research data (e.g., in the metadata). The following consistent naming must must be strictly observed: Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant DOI]
Documentation
The Open Access activities and compliance with the Open Access Policy must be demonstrated in the final report to the FWF. This is done by specifying the persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI) under which the research data can be viewed and downloaded.