Data and metadata can be stored together in the same location or separately in different locations. This depends on the storage capabilities and your specific requirements. To align with the FAIR principles, your metadata should be available even if your data is no more accessible and it should be properly associated with the data it describes. Therefore, choosing the appropriate storage location is very important.

Data can be stored in different locations like Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs), databases, filesystems or data repositories. Storing your data in repositories ensures that administrative metadata are created and stored. In addition, your data becomes better searchable and findable. This contributes to more efficient data management and alignment with FAIR principles. There exist general-purpose data repositories (such as Zenodo), which support a wide range of disciplines. Additionally, there are also registries which include different research data repositories (such as re3data). Institutional repositories (such as KITopen) are available and managed by universities to store and publish their outputs. Project-specific data repositories are also available, such as the NFDI-MatWerk Data Repository hosted by the NFDI-MatWerk consortium.

If you only need to store administrative metadata, this can be done when uploading your data to a repository, as all repositories support this functionality. However, if you want to include more detailed metadata to enrich your data documentation, there are dedicated metadata repositories available for this purpose. Project-specific metadata repositories are available, such as the NFDI-MatWerk Metadata Repository hosted by the NFDI-MatWerk consortium and the MetaRepo Metadata Repository hosted by the NEP and JL-MDMC consortia.

No, you can choose whether you want to make your (meta)data public, keep it private, share it only with your colleagues or publish it with view-only rights. Most repositories provide the access control permission and user authentication functionalities in order to manage the access rights. In order to fully benefit from the FAIR principles, it is recommended to make your metadata publicly available even if your data is not.

Yes, you can still register your metadata in a metadata repository even if the data itself isn’t stored in a repository. It’s essential to link the metadata to the data it describes. This helps ensure the metadata remains accessible, even if the data becomes unavailable, which supports alignment with the FAIR principles.

Regardless of where your data and metadata are stored, establishing a clear link between them is essential. This association connects the descriptive information (metadata) with the actual object being described (data). This can be done by specifying the location of the data within the metadata document. The best way to do it is to use a globally unique and persistent identifier such as Digital Object Identifier (DOI), Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID),...