Le 27 janvier 2026
Among the many solutions for publishing your research data, which ones best comply with FAIR principles?
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If no ethical or legal constraints prevent it (see Can I / Should I share my data openly?), the practice of open sharing of research data (open data) allows you to make your research more transparent and reusable, while also improving your visibility and facilitating future collaborations. Moreover, making your research data available in accordance with FAIR principles ensures optimal findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability.
Several sharing options are available to you:
A data repository is an online platform where you can deposit research datasets, document them with appropriate and as rich and sustainable metadata as possible, assign them an identifier such as a DOI or Handle, and associate them with an appropriate reuse license.
Depositing your research data in such a space helps you comply with FAIR principles, provided the repository offers these functionalities. Most of these repositories are free. Have a look at the Choose a data repository page !
Scientific articles dedicated exclusively to the description of datasets—often large-scale or particularly innovative—allow you to make your data visible and document it effectively, while potentially benefiting from peer review in the journal where they are published.
These articles, called data papers, can be combined with depositing the actual data files in a data repository to ensure maximum compliance with FAIR principles. However, they most often involve additional costs associated with publishing an article (compared to using a repository alone). Nature Scientific Data or CODATA Data Science Journal are examples of data journals.
Adding dataset files as appendices to a scientific article is also a common practice, made possible by many scientific journals. This approach has the advantage of bringing together data and results in the same place and allows both to benefit from peer review.
Although convenient, this method has the drawback of associating research data with the metadata of the article, which does not allow for a clear distinction between data and results. As a result, it complies less well with FAIR principles.
Moreover, publishing articles can be costly: using data repositories is often a less expensive alternative.
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