Introducing Open Data Format: A Platform-Independent, Non-Proprietary, Metadata-Enriched, Multilingual Data Format and its Implementation in R and Stata

Abstract

This paper introduces the Open Data Format (ODF), a new, non-proprietary, multilingual, metadata enriched, and zip-compressed data format that meets the FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. The data format is specified as a CSV file with the raw data and an XML file containing the metadata both compressed into a zip file with the .zip extension. Data files can be enriched with multilingual metadata following the forthcoming DDI Codebook 2.6 standard. The paper also introduces software packages for R (opendataformat) and Stata (opendf) that provide import and export filters and enable data users to work with ODF data files in the respective environment.