Research Data Management: Wrapping Up: Publishing and Sharing Your Data

UW has a membership with the generalist data repository Dryad. See our guide to see if Dryad is the right place to be depositing your data.

Publishing and sharing research data is a great way of incorporating open access and FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles into your research journey. By sharing your research, other researchers can validate and build upon your research, creating a collaborative culture. Making work openly accessible supports research as a whole, and the amount of open access articles continues to rise year by year.

In addition, many funding agencies and institutions, such as the NIH, have also encouraged or updated their policies to require some level of open data sharing. SPARC has a tool to browse data and article sharing policies by funding agencies, so researchers can gain a better understanding of specific data sharing requirements they may have to navigate.

A good first step to publishing and sharing your research data is establishing a data management plan (DMP), which is a document required or recommended as part of the grant application process by a wide number of funders, including the NIH and NSF. A DMP helps researchers establish how data will be handled throughout the data lifecycle, including what kinds of data are collected, accompanying metadata, where it will be stored, and how access to the data will be managed.

There are several options for sharing or publishing your data. Generally speaking, repositories and publisher websites are the most widely accepted way of making research data available.

A repository is a data storage space which “provides long-term storage and access to research data that is the basis for a scholarly publication” (re3data.org). Storing data in a repository ensures that the research data is organized and accessible beyond the life of a grant or research project, and provides a back-up option to protect your data. See below for different repository options.

There are a variety of reasons researchers should considering sharing their data at the end of a project. Sharing can:

• Accelerate research and provide greater exposure to data
• Increase possibility of future research collaborations
• Potentially increase citation of source papers (Piwowar, 2007)
• Increase return on research investment by allowing continued re-use of data (funding agencies value this)
• Many funding agencies (see SPARC list) and journals (e.g. Nature, Science) are now implementing data sharing requirements
• Encourage scientific enquiry and debate

Questions to consider before sharing your data:

• Deposit in a subject-specific or institutional repository
• Submit as supplementary information with an article to be published in a journal
• Make available on a website
• Make available on departmental servers
• Informal peer-to-peer sharing via email or removable media
• Use an ORCiD ID to create a profile of all your publications including datasets.
• Create a persistent identifier for a long-lasting reference

Why should you preserve your data?

• Proper preservation of the data ensures the integrity of the data remains intact for future use and easy access. 
• Whether or not you share your research data, the University of Washington has requirements for the preservation of research data which are laid out in Grants Information Memorandum 37. For specific retention requirements for research data, see General Schedule 7: Research and Grant/Contract Records.
• More information is available in our Preservation Guide

Discipline-specific Repositories

General Repositories

Institutional Repositories