Sharing Your Data

You will want to make your data public for many different reasons, whether to apply for external research awards or grants, to support the publication of a final project, or to share and collaborate with colleagues in your field.

Though not all of your data will be necessary to share. It is important to ask the questions: what kind of data do I have? Who is my audience? What would others find useful? What contributes to existing discourse?

Your research data should also adhere to the FAIR Guiding Principles. These are:

Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability.

These are principles that exist to promote open access and reproducibility of published research. They were produced to accommodate scientific data. There is no one set way to achieve this, but first ensuring that your research data is personally stored and preserved properly, will help to meet FAIR standards if you decide to publish.

There are a number of ways you can make your data public.

You could use a third party hosting service like GitHub, Zenodo, Google Drive, or a website. This would mean you are responsible for hosting your data through a third party service, which means handling concerns like maintenance, security, permissions, promotion and findability.

Or

You could use an open access digital repository. There might be one connected with your university, or coincide with a specific field. You can find one using OpenDOAR Directory of Open Access Repositories.

The benefit of using OA repositories means that infrastructure for persistent URLs, long-term access, security, permissions, and searchability or linking is already built in and handled by the repository.

Publishing and making data public also comes with further sets of requirements and considerations about restrictions and copyright issues. That is outside the scope of this module, but see the links on the Resources page at the end to read more.