These policy recommendations are a deliverable from the EC FP7 funded RECODE project (2012-2014), which aimed at assisting stakeholders within the scholarly communications ecosystem, e.g., policy makers, research funders, data managers, and publishers, to implement open access to research data. The recommendations, which are a product of research, analysis and stakeholder consultations, provide both over-arching and stakeholder specific guidance. While a consensus is observed amongst many policy makers on the benefits of open access for science, industry and civil society, there are still important barriers that need to be overcome. RECODE identified in particular two overarching issues in the mobilization of open access to research data: a lack of coherent open data ecosystem and a lack of attention to the specificity of research practices, processes and form of data collections.