Concordat on Open Research Data

The Concordat on Open Research Data is a UK higher-education sector agreement, published on 28 July 2016, that sets out ten principles for making research data openly available. It was developed by a multi-stakeholder UK Open Research Data Forum working group and formally issued by four signatory bodies: the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), Research Councils UK (RCUK), Universities UK, and the Wellcome Trust. RCUK’s functions were subsequently absorbed into UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) in 2018, and HEFCE’s functions were split between the Office for Students and Research England (also part of UKRI); the Concordat’s ten principles remain in active use across UK research organisations and continue to inform UKRI’s own open-research expectations.

What the Concordat is — and isn’t

The Concordat’s own text is explicit that it is ‘not a rulebook,’ but a statement of community-developed expectations of good practice — it does not mandate, codify, or legally require specific actions by any institution or researcher. It sits alongside, and explicitly does not supersede, existing statutory, regulatory, and funder-specific obligations (such as data protection law or a funder’s own Data Management Plan requirements). Its purpose is to give UK research organisations, funders, and researchers a shared, consistent set of expectations to build their own policies around.

The ten principles

1. Open access to research data is an enabler of high quality research, a facilitator of innovation, and safeguards good research practice.
2. There are sound reasons why openness may need to be restricted — but any restriction must be justified and justifiable, case by case, not applied as a blanket policy.
3. Open access to research data carries a significant cost, which should be respected and appropriately resourced by all parties (funders, institutions, and researchers).
4. The right of data creators to reasonable first use is recognised — researchers who generate original data may hold a reasonable, well-defined exclusive-use period before wider sharing is expected, varying by discipline.
5. Use of others’ data should conform to legal, ethical and regulatory frameworks, including formal citation and acknowledgement of the original data creators.
6. Good data management is fundamental to all stages of the research process and should be planned from the outset, typically via a Data Management Plan.
7. Data curation is vital to make data useful for others and to support its long-term preservation, using appropriate repositories, metadata, and non-proprietary formats where possible.
8. Data supporting publications should be accessible by the publication date and in citeable form (e.g. via a DOI), and should generally be retained for at least 10 years from the date of a publication that relies on it.
9. Support for developing appropriate data skills is a shared responsibility across researchers, institutions, and funders.
10. Regular reviews of institutional progress towards open research data should be undertaken.

Why it matters for research administrators

Because the Concordat is a voluntary framework rather than a regulation, its practical force comes from how individual institutions and funders build its principles into their own binding policies — grant terms, institutional data policies, and DMP templates. UK research offices commonly cite the Concordat directly in data policy documents as the underlying rationale for requirements such as: a documented justification for any decision not to share data (Principle 2), reasonable embargo or first-use periods before data is released (Principle 4), and minimum retention periods for data underlying published findings (Principle 8). Understanding the Concordat’s ten principles is therefore useful less as a compliance checklist in its own right, and more as the shared vocabulary UK institutional and funder policies draw on when they set their own binding data-sharing requirements.

Relationship to other frameworks

The Concordat predates, and is complementary to, the FAIR data principles (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable), which describe the technical properties good open data should have; the Concordat instead addresses the policy and governance question of when and how institutions and researchers should decide to make data open at all. It also sits alongside the UK’s separate Concordat to Support Research Integrity, which the Concordat on Open Research Data explicitly references on the question of individual versus institutional responsibility for compliance with ethical, legal and professional frameworks.