Interoperability is defined as a characteristic of a product or system, whose
interfaces are completely understood to work with other products or
systems, at present or in the future, in either implementation or
access, without any restrictions.
More specifically within the interlinked information infrastructures for Open Science environment, the data needs to be connected and interoperable, in order to provide a free and instant access to scholarly communication outputs.
In the context of the FAIR principles, interoperability is discussed in relation to the fact
that “research data usually need to be integrated with other data [...] in addition, the data
need to interoperate with applications or workflows for analysis, storage, and processing”.