Sharing
In parallel to the publication of your research findings in a reviewed journal, it is recognized as good practice (and often required) to make the raw data that support your findings available to the research community. This allows other researchers to reproduce your findings and enables reusability in subsequent research. When you finish your study, you might thus want or have to make your data accessible. This page provides useful information to help you publish and disseminate your data.
Multidisciplinary repositories
Zenodo
Zenodo (zenodo.org) is a research data repository created, hosted and operated by CERN and OpenAIRE. An overview of the terms of use and functionality of the service can be seen in the “About” section of the web site:
Note: Data published in Zenodo are assumed to be open, the service is thus unsuitable for sensitive data, such as personal or copyrighted data.
Dryad
Dryad (datadryad.org) is a research data repository, originally funded by the National Science Foundation. Dryad is governed by a nonprofit membership organization. Membership is open to any stakeholder organization, including but not limited to journals, scientific societies, publishers, research institutions, libraries, and funding organizations.
Please note that Dryad and Zenodo are compliant with the requests by SNSF to use not-for-profit storage solutions for data. Another common repository Figshare (figshare.com), which is operated by Macmillan Publishers, is not compliant to that requirement.
Domain-specific Repositories
Some research communities maintain repositories for domain-specific data:
- re3data is a catalog of such repositories.
- The Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) provides a list of generalist, discipline-specific and institutional data repositories.
- Elixir list of Deposition Databases for Biomolecular Data.
- See also the Data Deposit Recommendation Service (DDRS) for the humanities.
- See also an overview of subject related repositories by the Open Access Directory.
- See also an overview of subject related repositories by PlOS.
- Swiss repositories:
- Humanities DaSCH - Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities
- Social sciences, linguistics SWISSUbase
Research data are becoming increasingly openly available through data archives, supplementary material in scientific journals and on the websites of research groups.
Multidisciplinary and disciplinary archives can be found with the help of Re3data – Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.
Some data sets are findable via Google, Google scholar or customized search engines for data, such as:
Bioschemas aims to improve data interoperability in life sciences. It does this by encouraging people in life science to use schema.org markup, so that their websites and services contain consistently structured information. This structured information then makes it easier to discover, collate and analyse distributed data.
Persistent identifiers allow resource providers (e.g. journals, respositories, …) to uniquely identify persons or cite datasets in the research community. The most important of these identifiers are the DOI and the ORCID.
- DOI: Digital Object Identifier (doi.org)
A digital object identifier (DOI) is a unique alphanumeric string assigned by a registration agency (the International DOI Foundation) to identify content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet. It makes research data and publications citable. - ORCID: Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (orcid.org)
ORCID provides an identifier for authors to use with their name as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. For more details about this identifier, check here: orcid.org/about
To register with ORCID, click here: orcid.org/register