openEHR Is FAIR-Enabling by Design

The FAIR Principles are a set of recommendations that aim to underpin knowledge discovery and integration by making the research outcomes Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. These guidelines encourage the accurate recording and exchange of data, coupled with contextual information about their creation, expressed in domain-specific standards and machine-readable formats. This paper analyses the potential support to FAIRness of the openEHR specifications and reference implementation, by theoretically assessing their compliance with each of the 15 FAIR principles. Our study highlights how the openEHR approach, thanks to its computable semantics-oriented design, is inherently FAIR-enabling and is a promising implementation strategy for creating FAIR-compliant Clinical Data Repositories (CDRs).