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 providing free access to research data on the internet while still 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 be provided to Research data and similar materials collected and/or analyzed using FWF funding:
- Open access is mandatory for the research data underlying the project’s academic publications. This means all 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 academic 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 principal investigator. 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 acknowledged for research data (e.g., in the metadata). The following consistent naming must must be strictly observed: Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [grant DOI]
Documentation
Open access activities and compliance with the Open-Access Policy must be documented in the Final Project Report to the FWF by providing persistent identifiers (e.g., DOI) where the research data can be viewed and downloaded.