Share & Preserve Your Data
Norms in scholarship and publishing increasingly favor open research data. Open research data are those generated during the research process, which the researcher chooses to make available for others to freely use, fully re-use, and redistribute. Some researchers are required by the terms of their grants to make their research data open. But they are not the only researchers who choose to do so.
This page provides information and resources for those interested (by requirement or choice) in open research data. Questions addressed include: Where can I deposit my data? What is involved in making a deposit? Do I have any intellectual property rights over open my data? And how can I encourage proper citation of my data?
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Data Repositories
A data repository is a data storage entity. There are many data repositories for academic research. However, repositories are often disciplinary-specific so it is important to pick the right repository for your research. The best test of repository's 'fit' for you is whether it is someplace that the most likely users of your data would look.
The following sites maintain lists of many repositories that accept research data:
Data Ownership
Several intellectual property rights might come into play when dealing with research data:
- Trade secrets (confidential information): Most scientific researchers own trade secrets related to their data, but any public disclosure of the data or research nullifies this protection.
- Copyrights: Raw data itself is not subject to copyright but some aspects of a dataset may. These include annotations, analyses, formatting, or other expressions of the data. Additionally, separate copyrights can attach to visualizations, organizational structures, and metadata.
- Patents: These may apply to some forms of data. More commonly, data sharing may impact acquisition of patent protection in inventions that arise from research.
- Contracts: The ability to use contracts overlays all of these right. Contracts can be used to provide permission for reuse through licensing of underlying rights. Contracts may also be used to restrict reuse merely as a term and condition of granting access to data.
Adapted from William & Mary (http://guides.libraries.wm.edu/datamanagement/IP)
Data Citation
Data citation is an important component of data sharing and data reuse. Citing data gives data creators credit for creating and sharing their work, and creates a trail of research progress similar to the citation of articles and books.
Unfortunately, the style guidelines for data citation are still quite fluid and variable across publishers and associations. To make sure that the data you generate and share is readily cited by others regardless of where they publish, it is important to ensure that researchers can easily identify the following elements in your data:
- Author(s)
- Title
- Year of publication: The date when the dataset was published or released (rather than the collection or coverage date)
- Publisher: the data center/repository
- Any applicable identifier (including edition or version)
- Availability and access: URL or other location information for the data (e.g., DOI)
To encourage strong norms of data citation, you should always take care to cite others' data in your own research. If your publication outlet lacks explicit guidance on data citation format, the library suggests following recommendations from DataCite-- an international organization that helps researchers to find, access, and use data. Their recommended data citation format is:
- Creator (PublicationYear): Title. Publisher. Identifier
It may also be desirable to include information from two optional properties, Version and ResourceType (as appropriate). If so, the recommended form is as follows:
- Creator (PublicationYear): Title. Version. Publisher. ResourceType. Identifier
For citation purposes, DataCite recommends that DOI names are displayed as linkable, permanent URLs:
Learn more about DOI and other persistent identifiers.
Adapted from University of Texas, Arlington http://libguides.uta.edu/datamanagement/sharing