Open science will make science more efficient, reliable and responsive to societal challenges. The European Commission has sought to advance Open Science policy from its inception in a holistic and integrated way, covering all aspects of the research cycle from scientific discovery and review to sharing knowledge, publishing and outreach. 

This article discusses how data citation has evolved over the last couple of decades and highlights issues that need more research and attention.

The State of Open Data 2019 report is the fourth in the series and includes survey results and a collection of articles from global industry experts.It is now the longest running longitudinal study on the subject, which was created in 2016 to examine attitudes and experiences of researchers working with open data - sharing it, reusing it, and redistributing it. This year's survey received a record number of survey participants with around 8,500 responses from the research community. While most trends are encouraging around the adoption and acceptance of open data, the research community is now demanding more enforcement of the mandates that have been adopted by many governments, funders, publishers and institutions around the world.The majority of researchers want funding withheld and penalties for a lack of data sharing.

A new report summarises the results of a survey of European research funders on Open Access and Research Data policies, commissioned by SPARC Europe.

Transparent evaluations of FAIRness are increasingly required by a wide range of stakeholders, from scientists to publishers, funding agencies and policy makers. We propose a scalable, automatable framework to evaluate digital resources that encompasses measurable indicators, open source tools, and participation guidelines, which come together to accommodate domain relevant community-defined FAIR assessments. The components of the framework are: (1) Maturity Indicators - community-authored specifications that delimit a specific automatically-measurable FAIR behavior; (2) Compliance Tests - small Web apps that test digital resources against individual Maturity Indicators; and (3) the Evaluator, a Web application that registers, assembles, and applies community-relevant sets of Compliance Tests against a digital resource, and provides a detailed report about what a machine "sees" when it visits that resource. We discuss the technical and social considerations of FAIR assessments, and how this translates to our community-driven infrastructure. We then illustrate how the output of the Evaluator tool can serve as a roadmap to assist data stewards to incrementally and realistically improve the FAIRness of their resources.

Efforts to make research results open and reproducible are increasingly reflected by journal policies encouraging authors to provide data availability statements. As a consequence of this, there has been a strong recent uptake of data availability statements, but it is still unclear what proportion of these statements actually contain well-formed links to data, and if there is an added value in providing them.