An important part of producing research data is writing documentation or metadata to go with it. Metadata gives context and meaning to your research data or materials, helping you and others understand and reuse it in the future. As such, creating metadata and documentation complies with the FAIR principles in practice.
It is a good idea to prepare metadata while you are doing your research, all throughout the research project. Your documentation or metadata should clearly explain how and why you collected and used your data or research materials. Documenting your research is also useful to you. After a long period of research, details can easily be forgotten, so it is a good idea to describe the data and the research process immediately along the way. You will also be asked to provide metadata if you store your research data in a repository.
In some cases, it is advisable to use a specific metadata standard or predefined formats to store the metadata. If you are depositing your research data to a data repository, the repository may instruct you on what kind of descriptive information you will need to provide to be stored by them.
LUT recommends stored metadata to be licenced with the Creative Commons CC0 licence.
A persistent identifier (PID) is a long-lasting reference to a document, file, web page, or other digital object. Most PIDs have a unique identifier, which is linked to the current address of the metadata or content. For example, URN and DOI are both persistent identifiers that are commonly used for stored datasets.
See more about PIDs and metadata in the context of the FAIR principles in the video below.