Open technical standards

Support the development, maintenance, adoption, dissemination, and implementation of technical standards that are open, freely accessible, and internationally agreed to the greatest possible extent.

By developing, maintaining, adopting, disseminating, and implementing internationally agreed technical standards, policymakers can ensure seamless data interoperability, long-term accessibility, and compliance with global Open Science mandates.

Policymakers are encouraged to take the following specific actions:

• Ensure that national and institutional research infrastructures comply with international standards. Mandate that all publicly funded research data repositories comply with Open Science standards (e.g., FAIR, OpenAIRE, Dublin Core, DataCite).

• Develop national Open Science portals that centralise information on approved standards, best practices, and compliance guidelines.

• Establish national committees to coordinate with international standardisation bodies (e.g., Research Data Alliance (RDA), OpenAIRE, FAIRsharing.org).

• Fund working groups to develop national guidelines aligned with global standards (e.g., FAIR principles, OpenAIRE metadata schema, CoreTrustSeal certification).

• Require regular evaluation of data-sharing policies to align with evolving standards from Horizon Europe, OpenAIRE, and RDA.

• Provide long-term funding for technical standard maintenance, ensuring sustainability beyond initial development.

• Organise training workshops and webinars in collaboration with FAIRsharing.org, RDA, and OpenAIRE to educate researchers on metadata standards, open licensing, and interoperability frameworks.

• Implement automated compliance checks in national funding applications to ensure researchers use open, standardised metadata.

• Encourage open community contributions by inviting researchers, data stewards, and institutions to provide input on emerging standards.

• Establish feedback mechanisms where researchers and institutions report issues or gaps in existing standards for continuous refinement.

Implementing open, freely accessible, and internationally agreed technical standards faces several hurdles.

• Divergences between disciplines make it challenging to create unified standards while respecting disciplinary specificities and avoiding fragmentation.

• Establishing international consensus requires extensive coordination among diverse stakeholders, often leading to lengthy development processes.

• Sustaining the maintenance and improvement of standards is resource-intensive and demands long-term funding, technical expertise, and organisational commitment.

The adoption of open standards may be hindered by varying levels of awareness and engagement among researchers and institutions, particularly in disciplines with less-established standardisation frameworks.

• Semantic technologies such as ontologies and Linked Data, while promising, require specialised knowledge and tools that many researchers lack.

• Ensuring compliance and alignment with global frameworks demands robust governance and collaboration mechanisms.

• Overly discipline-specific approaches may hinder interoperability across domains and regions.