Open Research Data is freely accessible data that can be reused. It represents an increasingly important area of Open Science. When data is made available without technical, financial, and legal barriers, this improves traceability, increases efficiency, and enables better quality assurance. Currently, research data is often still inaccessible, as it is stored on USB sticks and private storage media. When research results are made available to a wider audience with comprehensive documentation, it is easier to verify their robustness and reproduce or replicate them. Open Research Data therefore helps to strengthen trust in science.

Making research data available is gradually becoming standard practice; it is also a central element in reproducible research. It should be accompanied by systematic research data management, which also offers many practical advantages for day-to-day research. Furthermore, research organisations are increasingly demanding that researchers compile data management plans that give information on how they make their research data available. Since research data often have to be disclosed later in the research process anyway, for example when a journal requires it, opening up your own data right from the start makes sense.

Generally speaking, Open Data can be downloaded, analysed, reused and shared by others. There are good reasons, however, why open and transparent research data are not always 100% practical. Research data should therefore be “as open as possible and as closed as necessary”; in science we speak of FAIR Data in this context. But the fact that the mere existence of data is known, already represents an important first step.