Fig. 2: Tiers of metadata and data and their approximate volume.
From: FAIR data enabling new horizons for materials research
The left axis is the volume in bytes. As part of the research process, acquired data are filtered, analysed and refined. This generally produces smaller and smaller datasets of higher value. Owing to the expected data volume, the same level of availability for all data cannot be guaranteed. Therefore, data are categorized into four tiers with different levels of availability, from not shared at all (tier 0) towards published with a DOI (tier 3).
