Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A genomics dataset deposited in ENA under public access.
- Is an instance
A social-science survey deposited in UKDS Open access under CC-BY-4.0.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A 'restricted access' repository deposit.
- Not an instance
Aggregate tables in a paper appendix without the row-level data.
Editorial commentary
Open data is the practice of making the data underlying a piece of research freely available for any user to access, use, modify, and share, subject at most to an attribution requirement, typically by depositing the dataset in a public repository under an open licence. It is bounded in practice by ethical, legal, and consent constraints that data on people, protected species, or sensitive locations often carry — where full open release is not possible, the accepted alternatives are controlled-access deposit (data available under an approved-access process), synthetic or simulated data that preserves statistical properties without exposing real records, or aggregate release of summary statistics rather than row-level data.
The Open Knowledge Foundation's Open Definition is the widely cited reference definition of what “open” means for data generally; alignment with the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) is complementary rather than equivalent — a dataset can be FAIR (well-described and technically accessible, potentially under controlled access) without being open in the licensing sense, and in principle open without being well-documented enough to be genuinely FAIR.
How it differs from open materials and open code
Open data is specifically about the dataset the study analysed — not the instruments or protocols used to generate it (see open materials) and not the software used to analyse it (see open code). A “restricted access” repository deposit, or a set of aggregate tables printed only in a paper's appendix without the underlying row-level records, does not meet the open-data standard even though something has technically been shared. Journals implementing the TOP Guidelines' Data Transparency standard grade exactly this distinction — the higher levels require deposit in a trusted repository with a persistent identifier and independent verification, not just a statement that data are “available.”
References
- Open Knowledge Foundation, The Open Definition v2.1.
- G7 Open Data Charter (2013).
Also known as
open research data
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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