Sharing your research data helps advance research, increase knowledge, and expand learning opportunities for researchers and students by making your work more accessible, preservable, and understandable. Most major public and private funding agencies and many journals now require data sharing as a prerequisite for grant awards and publication. Sharing data encourages reproducibility, reduces duplication, and allows for re-use of your data and lets others build upon your hard work.
Preserving your data ensures that researchers will be able to reuse and understand your data long into the future. Follow best practices for preservation, like using open file formats, providing good documentation, and ensuring that your data is stored in a place with a preservation plan.
The best place to both share and preserve your data is in a data repository.
Note that in general it is better to select a discipline-specific repository for increased discoverability of your research.
For information about Trinity's institutional repositories contact Amy Harrell (amy.harrell@trincoll.edu) or Amanda Matava (amanda.matava@trincoll.edu).
Are you depositing the data in a repository that will provide preservation services?
How are you preserving physical data specimens and records?
It's better to ask for money up front, then have to scramble for access to good preservation (required by many funders) of your data at the end of the project.
Specify clearly who owns the copyright and intellectual property rights to the data. Who can reuse it and how?
Are you using non-proprietary data formats (.csv, for example)? Are you including instructions on how to interpret the data?