Data papers contribute to the compliance with FAIR principles, in particular to the two principles of findability and reusability, insofar they help people (and machines) finding datasets and inform about the provenance and reuse rights.
This is one of the results of the survey on data papers presented by Schöpfel et al. in their conference paper. The survey provides more insights about the environment of data papers, i.e. disciplines, publishers and business models, and about their structure, length, formats, metadata and licensing.
But, what is data paper? The authors suggest the following definition: “Data papers are authored, peer reviewed and citable articles in academic or scholarly journals, whose main content is a description of published research datasets, along with contextual information about the production and the acquisition of the datasets, with the purpose to facilitate the findability, availability and reuse of research data; they are part of the research data management and crosslinked to data repositories”.
