Open Policy for Data and Underlying Data

Data encompasses all primary data, associated metadata, all relevant aggregated data, and any additional relevant data necessary to understand and assess the data in question. For research this must include any data needed to replicate and reproduce the reported study findings in their totality.

Data can be compiled into any open data file type, including any necessary access instructions, code, or supporting information files, to ensure the file(s) can be accessed and used by others.

The data must be available for reuse under the following conditions:

• Data must be dedicated to the public domain using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) Public Domain Dedication, or licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), or an equivalent license.
• Data must be available in a publicly documented machine-readable format and through application programming interfaces (API) and bulk download.
• Metadata and data must be available in an open, vendor-independent format.
• In the case of research articles, there must be immediate open access to the underlying research data upon publication of the article(s) or launch of the project.
• The dataset must have a persistent and unique identifier, such as a DOI (digital object identifier) to facilitate linking and citation.
• Provide long-term storage and preservation for the data.
• All documentation, learning resources and any other content related to the data must be made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), or an equivalent license.

Compliance is a requirement of referring to, covering by or referencing by OpenEPI. This open policy applies to all data and underlying data. Compliance will be continuously reviewed and authors, data producers and data curators will be contacted by the OpenEPI team when data used or referred by OpenEPI are found non-compliant.

More specific preconditions or activities around pre-publication data planning (in the case of research projects), data collection, analysis, storage, sovereignty, informed consent, interoperability, and the use of domain specific standards (for instance for specific data types and metadata schemes) are reviewed and evaluated individually by the OpenEPI team.