Resource Guides: Research Data Management Resources: Sharing/ Publishing Data

Why Share Research Data?

"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:

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

9 Simple Ways to Make It Easier to (Re)Use Your Data

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:

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

Sharing Clinical Trial Data

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.

Find a repository for data sharing in a registry or list

NIH Data Sharing Repositories
Annotated listing of NIH-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse, including submission and access information.
FAIRsharing.org
A curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies.
re3data.org
re3data.org maintains a curated registry of research data repositories. Use their Repository Finder tool to find the right repository for your data.

Deposit your data in a discipline-specific repository

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.
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).
GigaDB
Repository for biological and biomedical research datasets. Originally hosted datasets only from GigaScience, an open access journal.
GISAID
GISAID is an international database designed for the rapid sharing of information on all influenza and coronavirus data, including genetic sequencing. Data download is open to all but data deposit is restricted to participating labs.
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.
Protein Data Bank
A worldwide repository of information about the 3D structures of large biological molecules, including proteins and nucleic acids.

PubChem This link opens in a new window
Collection of freely accessible chemical information. Search chemicals by name, molecular formula, structure, and other identifiers. Find chemical and physical properties, biological activities, safety and toxicity information, patents, and citations. Accepts data for the PubChem Substance and PubChem BioAssay databases.

More discipline specific repositories for the health sciences

ICPSR This link opens in a new window
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. It also hosts a number of health data collections including the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA). UMass Chan is a member institution.
Any questions, please contact the UMass Chan Official Representative: Sally Gore, sally.gore@umassmed.edu, or the Designated Representative, Tess Grynoch, tess.grynoch@umassmed.edu.

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.

Publish your 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.

Instructions for depositing data in eScholarship@UMassChan

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

Publish your data in a generalist repository

Generalist Repository Comparison Chart
Compares seven generalist repositories that are part of the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI): Harvard Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo.
Generalist Repository Selection Flowchart
Decision tree for selecting the right repository for your research data featuring the the generalist repositories listed in the generalist repository comparison chart.

Select generalist repositories:

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.
Harvard Dataverse Repository
Free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data.
OSF
OSF is a free and open source project management repository that supports researchers across their entire project lifecycle.
Vivli
Global clinical research data sharing platform hosted by an independent, non-profit organization.
Zenodo
Repository run by the CERN data center which accepts all data types, mints DOIs, and keeps track of versions. Can also be used to archive GitHub repositories.

Publish your data in a data journal

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.
Scientific Data (Nature Publishing Group)
Publication launched in May 2014 for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets.
More ejournals on data mining and datasets in BrowZine

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. This page includes frequently asked questions.
Open Data - from SPARC
Open data resources from SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition.
Open Data Factsheet - from SPARC
One-page handout explaining the requirements for open data.
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.