Try the DMPTool to create a data management plan.
Why share your data?
- Required by publishers (e.g., the Nature Publishing Group, The American naturalist).
- Required by government funding agencies
- Allows data to be used to answer new questions
- Allows science to be more open
- Makes your papers more useful and citable by other scientists
To share your data
- Publish in an appropriate data repository or archive
- Deposit to CDL's Merritt repository
- Post online via a project or institutional web site
- Submit data to a journal article
Things to consider when Sharing and Archiving
* File Formats for Long Term Access
The file format in which you keep your data is a primary factor in one's ability to use your data in the future. Plan for both hardware and software obsolescence. See the sections on organizing files and file formats for details on preferrable long-term storage file formats.
* Don't Forget the Documentation
Document your research and data so others can interpret the data. It is important to begin to document your data at the very beginning of your research project and continue throughout the project.
* Ownership and Privacy
Make sure that you have considered the implications of sharing data, in terms of copyright and IP ownership, and ethical requirements such as privacy and confidentiality.
When and where do you intend to publish or distribute your data?
You can share your data easily by emailing it to requesters, or posting it to a website, Google, Amazon or Microsoft. However, this method of sharing makes it difficult for people to find your data. Depositing your data in an archive will facilitate its discovery and preservation.
Publish Your Data in a Repository
Any Discipline | Science and Engineering | Social Sciences | Arts and Humanities
Note: Not all of the repositories listed can ensure long-term preservation of your data; contact each one for more details. This list contains suggestions and is not necessarily complete. For a more complete list of data repositories, see these sites:
- DataBib: a searchable directory of research data repositories.
- Simmons University. Data Repositories
Data Created at UC (Any Discipline)
Merritt — a cost-effective repository service from the University of California Curation Center (UC3) that lets the UC community manage, archive, and share its valuable digital content. Use Merritt to provide long-term preservation of digital assets, share your research with others or meet the data sharing and preservation requirements of a grant-funded project. For more information contact UC3.
Escholarship — an open access publishing platform that offers UC departments, centers, and research units direct control over the creation and dissemination of the full range of their scholarship, including working papers, peer-reviewed journals, monographic series, paper/seminar series, postprints, and conference proceedings. Contact the CDL Publishing Group for more information.
Science and Engineering
- Archaeology
- Astronomy
- Atmospheric Science
- National Center for Atmospheric Research — Scientific datasets of historical value are curated and catalogued at the Mass Storage System
- Life Sciences
- Dryad — Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences.
- Protein Data Bank — An Information portal to biological macromolecular structures
- UniProt — Submit a new protein sequence to UniProtKB using SPIN, a web-based tool for submitting directly sequenced protein sequences to the Universal Protein Resource (for new nucleotide submissions, use EMBL's WEBIN instead).
- Chemistry
- PubChem — provides information on the biological activities of small molecules. It includes substance information, compound structures, and bioactivity data in three primary databases, PCSubstance, PCCompound, and PCBioAssay, respectively.
- Computer Science
- Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) — provides tools and analyses promoting the engineering and maintenance of a robust, scalable global Internet infrastructure.
- Earth Science
- GEON — Portal for sharing, publishing, and integrating data.
- Oceanography
- National Oceanographic Data Center — NODC is an organization made up of the Oceanographic Data Center, National Coastal Data Development Center, World Data Center for Oceanography, and the NOAA Central Library, integrated to provide access to the world's most comprehensive sources of marine environmental data and information.
- Snow and Ice
- National Snow and Ice Data Center — NSIDC archives cryospheric data. NSIDC acknowledges all data providers in do cumentation, metadata (Directory Interchange Format (DIF)), and references, and is also willing to hold or restrict data distribution until providers publish.
- Space Science
- National Space Science Data Center — NSSDC accepts data from: active archives in the space sciences funded through the Science Missions Directorate, missions in that same directorate, and individual scientists (mission or instrument principal investigators).
Social Sciences
- Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) — The world's largest archive of digital social science data. ICPSR staff can guide you in preparing your data for archiving and distribution. See their Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving and their page on Depositing Data.
Arts and Humanities
- Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive — the world's first interactive digital archive of policy-relevant data on the arts and cultural policy in the United States. It is a collaborative effort of Princeton University's Firestone Library and the Princeton Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies, with support from the Pew Charitable Trusts.
Credit to the University of Virginia's Scientific Data Consulting Group and the MIT Libraries for permission to use and adapt their data management planning pages, and to members of the UC3 community. Please send us any comments about these guidelines.
