•Data management is not a goal in itself, but a means to foster the advancement of knowledge. •The existing digital ecosystem surrounding scholarly output publication has many barriers preventing optimal discovery and reuse: •variety of approaches, •fragmentation of repositories, •different access policies, •uncertain license conditions, •lack of machine interfaces, •lack of metadata standardization… •To overcome these obstacles, a workshop was held in the Netherlands in 2014, bringing together a wide group of academic and private stakeholders, setting foundational principles that all research objects should be FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable