Spotlight article
The DARIAH Working Group on Research Data Management is five years old!
Researchers face numerous (and often contradictory) demands for making data publicly available and reusable as articulated in various research policy recommendations and funding requirements. At the same time, researchers struggle with a multiplicity of factors that hinder data sharing, including those of a legal, cultural, infrastructural, and managerial nature. Although there is increasing pressure from policy makers to make data openly available, in reality, only a small fraction of datasets are reused and very few scholarly publications include references to datasets. The FAIR guidelines have been developed to address this situation to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reuse of digital assets. In effect, creating FAIR data is the overarching goal of research data management: