Research Data Management Resources

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"Openness increases transparency and reliability, facilitates more effective collaboration, accelerates the pace of discovery, and fosters broader and more equitable access to scientific knowledge and to the research process itself."
— National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2018. Open Science by Design: Realizing a Vision for 21st Century Research. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25116

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.

When deciding on a repository to share data, the following list presents the preferred order of consideration:

1. Does your funder or the journal you want to publish in make any recommendations for deposit?​
2. Does your discipline use a specific data repository?​ - Consult a registry to find relevant repositories
3. Can your data be deposited in eScholarship@UMassChan or a similar institutional repository at your collaborator’s institution?​
4. Use a generalist repository that meets your data deposit needs

Data Repository finders for the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy:

This paper "Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data" by Ethan P. White et al. presents 9 recommendations for scientists on how to to make their data understandable, easy to analyze, and readily available:

1. Share your data
2. Provide metadata
3. Provide an unprocessed form of the data
4. Use standard data formats for files, tables, and within table cells
5. Use good null values
6. Make it easy to combine your data with other datasets
7. Perform basic quality control
8. Use an established repository
9. Use an established and liberal license

The Institute of Medicine has created a dynamic infographic for recommendations on when to share clinical trial data. This inforgraphic is freely available from their website.

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

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

Select generalist repositories:

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