Open data has become “strongly embedded into research practices” and FAIR (findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) data principles are now widely recognized, with awareness almost tripling from 15.2 percent in 2018 to 40.6 percent recently, according to “The State of Open Data 2025: A Decade of Progress and Challenges,” a report published in January by Digital Science, Springer Nature, and Figshare. The percentage of researchers who responded that they had “never heard of FAIR” has fallen from almost 60 percent in 2018 to 20.4 percent in the 2025 survey.

The report also found that 88.1 percent of researchers now endorse open access, 80.9 percent support open data, and 75.7 percent support open peer review. However, almost 70 percent (69.2 percent) of researchers say they receive too little credit for sharing data. While this is a slight improvement from the 77.9 percent of researchers who expressed concerns about credit attribution when the question was first asked in the 2020 survey, these latest results indicate that “the overwhelming majority of researchers still perceive a fundamental misalignment between the effort required for data sharing and the professional recognition received. The ‘credit gap’ represents one of the most significant barriers to widespread adoption of open science practices,” according to the report.

Now in its 10th year, this State of Open Data report combined 4,700 responses from researchers, librarians, policy leaders, and other experts from 151 countries.

“As the community’s expectations have been shaped by new funder mandates, FAIR principles, and growing global momentum towards transparency, their voices have charted a steady cultural shift,” Dr. Daniel Hook, CEO of Digital Science, wrote in an intro to the report, describing how respondents’ opinions have evolved during the past decade. “Researchers have described increasing recognition of open data’s value, such as its role in improving the impact and reach of research, its reproducibility and reuse, and in strengthening research integrity.”

Support for national open data mandates, however, is falling globally, and there have been steep drops in some countries. In Australia, 63.2 percent of respondents supported the country’s open data mandates in 2016, when the first survey was conducted, compared with only 27.4 percent in this current survey. In Brazil, support fell from 64.7 percent to 39 percent. Only 52.9 percent of respondents from the United States supported mandates in 2016, but numbers have fallen even from that tepid level, with only 29.7 percent of respondents supporting them now. In other countries, such as India, backing for mandates has remained relatively flat, with 59.8 percent supporting mandates in 2016 and 54.7 percent in 2025, but India was the only surveyed country in which support remained above 50 percent. As the announcement suggests, mandates may become unpopular if they are not accompanied by support from the government or institution imposing the mandates. This declining enthusiasm “reinforces the need to pair policy with practical infrastructure and support that makes sharing feasible and genuinely reusable,” the report states.

Researchers also appear to be adopting AI tools rapidly. When the survey first asked questions about AI adoption in 2024, only 22.1 percent of respondents described themselves as active users. Just a year later, in this current survey, 31.9 percent of respondents said they were active users. “At the same time, the pool of those ‘not aware’ or ‘aware but not considering’ contracted meaningfully (-9 percentage points combined), indicating that hesitation is rapidly diminishing,” the report notes. The most dramatic shift has been in data processing, although the use of AI in metadata creation has also spiked, with 16.1 percent of respondents using AI for description and documentation tasks in 2024, compared with 25.1 percent in the most recent survey.

Demonstrating the long-term and ongoing impact of open data to bolster institutional support remains a key challenge. “Institutions need to demonstrate the impact and return on investment of open data to justify infrastructure costs, meet funder expectations, and align with performance metrics such as rankings and visibility,” the report notes. In an “expert voices” section of the report, Secretary General of the Research Data Alliance Hilary Hanahoe explains that “An institution that wants to promote open science or open data is expected to do the data management, wrangling, and cleaning themselves. The productivity of a researcher is reduced significantly. There is definitely a return on investment, but it's hard to demonstrate, and people like to put a dollar or a euro on it.”

But despite these challenges, the report illustrates the progress that the State of Open Data survey has documented over the past decade. “Ten years of data show that open research is no longer an aspiration—it’s embedded practice,” Mark Hahnel, VP of open research at Digital Science and founder of Figshare, wrote in the announcement. “But progress doesn’t stop here. Researchers need systems that reward openness and workflows that make sharing effortless. Reforming research assessment and aligning incentives will be key to sustaining progress.”

“Collaborations like this [survey and report] enable us to put researchers at the centre of what we do,” wrote Graham Smith, director of research data innovation at Springer Nature. “Their insights are essential to ensuring that open science policies, infrastructures, and tools are relevant, practical, and effective in reducing researcher burden and improving data quality. Beyond this, we recognise that openness delivers the greatest value when combined with quality and clear evidence of benefits.”

The full 37-page report is available as a free download at stateofopendata.com.