You can search for data through general-purpose repositories (such as Zenodo), registry of data repositories (like re3data), or institutional ones (f.e. KITopen) depending on where it has been stored. Most of these repositories provide search interfaces allowing you to filter results using administrative metadata attributes. The access to the data may require authentication, depending on the permissions set by the data owner. We provide two search interfaces, allowing users to find specific created metadata that goes beyond the administrative metadata. The first one is hosted by the NFDI-MatWerk consortium and a second one offered by the NFFA and JL-MDMC consortia.

To enable the legal reuse with a proper citation of your data, it is important to publish it under a clear license (e.g. Creative Commons License, Apache License,...). A license is a legal agreement between the data creator and the end-user, or the repository where the data is stored, specifying how the data may be used. Choosing an open license or one with minimal restrictions ensures that others can reuse and cite your data in a legally compliant way.

No, without a specified license, you don’t have the legal rights to reuse the (meta)data. In this case, you can contact the author or data owner and ask them to provide a license.

Yes, most repositories provide the access control permission and user authentication functionalities in order to keep your (meta)data private or share it only with some collaborators during active research. There is also the possibility to publish your (meta)data with view-only rights, enabling controlled access. In order to fully benefit from the FAIR principles, it is recommended to make your (meta)data publicly available.