FAIR - Findable

Data should be easy to find and identify

 

Publish in trusted repository

The best way to make data findable is to publish it in a trusted repository. If possible, chose a repository which is discipline specific and used by your community. Think of places where you go to look for data you want to use for your own research. A good repository should care about the quality of the information you attach to the data and how your data is formatted. The best repositories have some data requirements you need to satisfy, you should not see these as meaningless obstacles but rather as an opportunity to improve your data presentation. Usually these requirements are very reasonable and after the first time you submit some data you will be familiar with them and the process will be faster. It is possible to list your data in more than one repository, this is perfectly acceptable and encouraged to increase the data visibility. Be careful though to make sure you always a one official record with an attached DOI to which all the other listings refer to.  

Use identifiers

Make sure a DOI is minted for your data, so it is easy for anyone who uses it to reference it and for other researchers to discover it if it was used in a paper. Use also other available identifiers as grant, researcher and projects identifiers, whenever possible. If you keep all your research products connected in this way, any time a researcher  looks at one of them is more likely to discover the others.