Resource Guides: Research Data Management Resources: Open and Publicly Available Data

What Is Open Data?

"Open data" is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone - subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike (from the Open Data Handbook). The Open Data movement began with efforts to improve access to government data (see data.gov). This page focuses on open scientific data: the primary research data published within or alongside research papers.

Check out this Open Data factsheet from SPARC!

Registries and Lists

Data.gov
Home of the U.S. Government's open data. You can find federal, state and local data, tools, and resources to conduct research, build apps, design data visualizations, and more. Includes health, science, and public safety data.
Data Repositories and Trusted Partners
Repositories, databases, and database collaborations for NIH-funded genomics data.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories
Annotated listing of NIH-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse, including submission and access information.
Open Access Directory -- Data Repositories
A list of repositories and databases for open data. Organized by subject, including Biology, Chemistry, Medicine, and Multidisciplinary.
PLOS Recommended Repositories
PLOS, which has a data availability requirement, has compiled a list of recommended repositories organized by content type, which an author may choose to deposit data in, if they are appropriate to their field.
r3data.org
re3data.org maintains a curated registry of research data repositories. Use their Repository Finder tool to find the right repository for your data.

Data Repositories for the Biological Sciences

There are many options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication, including government-sponsored repositories, disciplinary repositories, third-party repositories, and the UMass Chan institutional repository, eScholarship@UMassChan.

For large datasets, here are selected data repositories for the biological sciences:

IGSR: The International Genome Sample Resource
Sequence and alignment data generated by the 1000genomes project and new data that has been generated from the samples and new samples collected with the same methods.
DANDI Achive
The DANDI Archive includes cellular neurophysiology data and is supported by the BRAIN Initiative.
dbGaP
Developed to archive and distribute the results of studies that have investigated the interaction of genotype and phenotype.
Dryad
Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed scientific and medical literature, particularly data for which no specialized repository exists. All material in Dryad is associated with a scholarly publication. For information about depositing to Dryad, including general recommendations for data management and describing data, see http://datadryad.org/pages/depositing.
figshare
figshare is a commercial service that provides a repository for researchers to publish all of their research outputs in a citable, sharable and discoverable manner. figshare is supported by Digital Science, a Macmillan Publishers company.
GenBank
GenBank is the NIH genetic sequence database, an annotated collection of all publicly available DNA sequences.
GEO (Gene Expression Omnibus)
An international public repository from NCBI that archives and freely distributes microarray, next-generation sequencing, and other forms of high-throughput functional genomics data submitted by the research community. Some submitted data is curated into GEO DataSets (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gds).
GigaScience
GigaScience is an open access journal that includes the database GigaDB for biological and biomedical research datasets that are affiliated with BioMed Central in collaboration with BGI, DataCite, BioSharing, and ISA-Tab.
GISAID
GISAID is an international database designed for the rapid sharing of information on all influenza and coronavirus data, including genetic sequencing.
Mouse Genome Informatics
International database resource from The Jackson Laboratory for the laboratory mouse, providing integrated genetic, genomic, and biological data. The projects contributing to this resource are: Mouse Genome Database (MGD) Project, Gene Expression Database (GXD) Project, Mouse Tumor Biology (MTB) Database Project, Gene Ontology (GO) Project at MGI, and MouseCyc Project at MGI.
NITRIC Image Repository
Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse (NITRC) repository of MRI scans.
OSF
OSF is a free and open source project management repository that supports researchers across their entire project lifecycle.
Protein Data Bank
A worldwide repository of information about the 3D structures of large biological molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids.
PubChem
Search BioAssay, Chemical Structure and Chemical Substances.

Open Data in eScholarship@UMassChan

eScholarship@UMassChan can serve as a home for research data files that support scholarly publications, including dissertations, theses, and journal articles that must meet requirements for the preservation and dissemination of data.

Benefits of sharing your data through eScholarship@UMassChan:

it is free to you
it can accommodate large file sizes and a variety of file formats
it can apply embargoes for access controls
it can provide a persistent identifier, such as a DOI
it can provide a Creative Commons license
it supplies usage metrics to help measure research impact
it includes sufficient metadata to enable discovery and reuse
it is a redundant copy of your data in the event that something should happen to your original
it is managed by the library

View this example of a data set housed in eScholarship@UMassChan

Publicly Available Health and Social Science Data Collections

Databases for Aging Related Secondary Analysis in the Behavioral and Social Sciences
A compilation of publicly available, national and international data sets supported in whole or in part by the National Institute on Aging Division of Behavioral and Social Research.
Gallup Polls
Polling data on a host of topics.
Global Health Observatory Data Repository
Access to over 50 data sets on important public health issues such as mortality, diseases, health systems, violence and injuries, and equity.
Healthdata.gov
Managed by the Department of Health and Human Services, this site makes HHS data easily accessible to the public and to health innovators, including data on clinical care provider quality, health service provider directories, consumer product data, and community health performance information.
ICPSR
The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research is a long-standing archive of over 500,000 social science data sets. Topic classifications include Healthcare and Facilities. UMass Chan is a member institution.
National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging
Funded by the National Institute on Aging and hosted at the ICPSR, NACDA makes available the largest library of data on aging in the United States.
National Center for Health Statistics
Part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, NCHS is the principal health statistics agency for the United States. Their website includes data sets on a wide range of issues related to public health, from birth control to whooping cough.
Pew Research Center
A "nonpartisan fact tank," Pew conducts public poll, media analysis, and demographic research on many topics of interest, including health and health care.
Project Tycho
A database of publicly available US and international data on public health, including the entire history of weekly National Notifiable Disease Surveillance System reports for the United States (1888-2013).
PubMed Central
Search this full text article database of NIH-funded research for associated data by using the "Associated Data" filter.
Qualitative Data Repository
Housed at Syracuse University, QDR selects, ingests, curates, archives, manages, durably preserves, and provides access to digital data used in qualitative and multi-method social inquiry.

Other Sources for Data

Google Dataset Search
Released in September 2018, this new facet to the familiar search engine can provide a list of links to available data on the web.
Google's Public Data Directory
Google's Public Data Directory provides validated datasets in graph and text formats that can be easily searched and narrowed down.
Reddit.com
An open source, open sharing source for data on an enormously wide range of topics.
UN Data
Factual, authoritative, and official international data from the United Nations.

Data Journals

Data journals are publications whose purpose is to expose and share research data, and to promote its re-use. Examples of data journals:

BMC Research Notes (BioMed Central)
An open access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes short publications, cases, updates, software, databases, and data sets in the fields of biology and medicine.
GigaScience (Oxford University Press)
Publishes 'big-data' studies from the entire spectrum of life and biomedical sciences.
Journal of Open Psychology Data (Ubiquity Press)
Makes psychology research data available for replication studies and additional studies.
Open Health Data (Ubiquity Press)
Publishes peer reviewed data papers describing health datasets with high reuse potential.
Scientific Data (Nature Publishing Group)
New publication which launched in May 2014 for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets.

Open Data Resources

Creative Commons and Data
Open data is facilitated by sharing under public terms to manage copyright restrictions that might otherwise limit dissemination or reuse of data, e.g. CC licenses or the CC0 public domain dedication.
DataCite
An international membership organization which aims to: establish easier access to research data; increase acceptance of research data as legitimate contributions in the scholarly record; and, to support data archiving. DataCite assigns DOI persistent identifiers to datasets.
Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency - from SPARC
This community resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding both current and future U.S. federal funder research data sharing policies is a joint project of SPARC & Johns Hopkins University Libraries.
Dat Project
Dat is free software for fast and encrypted file sharing and storage which allows for tracked changes and allows users to control where their files are kept.
NIH Data Sharing Policies
Lists data sharing policies in effect at NIH. It includes policies at the NIH, IC, division, and program levels that apply to broad sets of investigators and data.
Open Data - from SPARC
Open data resources from SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
Open Data Handbook
This handbook from the Open Knowledge Foundation is an introduction to the legal, social and technical aspects of open data, with a focus on government data.
PLOS Data Availability Policy
In 2014 PLOS updated their data policy to include a new requirement that authors submit a data availability statement with their manuscripts. A data availability statement indicates the location of the data set(s) that underpin the findings being reported.
The Tao of Open Science for Ecology
This article in Ecosphere includes a chart showing different open science workflows, and a table listing a wide range of tools available to support open science. The workflows and tools are applicable to many disciplines.

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