Documents in a digital form, other than scientific publications, which are collected or produced in the course of scientific research activities and are used as evidence in the research process, or are commonly accepted in the research community as necessary to validate research findings and results. Source: OD Directive

Traditionally the data was kept by researchers and only final research outputs, such as papers analysing the data, would be published. Open science holds that the data should be published, both to increase verifiability of the work and to enable it to be used in other research. The full spirit of open science collaboration demands data publication early in the project, but research culture will need to change appreciably before this becomes widespread. Research data management (RDM) is an emerging discipline that seeks best practices in handling this. Research data has been covered by the EU Directive regulating open data and the reuse of public sector information since 2019.

Source: ODH