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Trinity College
Library & Information Technology Services

Research Data Management

Sharing & Preservation

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.

Choosing a Repository

Questions to Ask

  • Will it accept your data?
    Some data repositories require that your university or organization to hold a membership in the repository or the organization sponsoring the repository.
     
  • Is it a curated or non-curated repository?
    A curated repository provides value-added services that help to organize, preserve, and share your data. This might require that you work with a curator before your data is made available. A non-curated repository allows you to upload your data and make it available without any mediation.
     
  • Are there any fees required?
    There are fees associated with some repositories, so you should figure this out early in your planning.
     
  • Is it a general or disciplinary repository?
    Think about the kind of audience you would like to share your data with. Is it important to target a particular community in a specialized repository, or do you want to reach out to a broader, more general audience?
     
  • What will you need to do to prepare your data for deposit?
    Since repositories may have different requirements for depositing data, think in advance about kinds of file formats and metadata that your repository of choice will accept.
     
  • How long can you store your data?
    Think about how long you would like to share your data and whether a repository is consistent with your short- or long-term plans.

Tips from Other Agencies

Data Repositories

General / Cross-Disciplinary Repositories

Need help selecting the best generalist repository for your needs?

Note that in general it is better to select a discipline-specific repository for increased discoverability of your research.

Science Engineering, and Biomedicine Repositories

Additional Recommended Repositories by Organization

Arts and Humanities Repositories

Social Science Repositories

Discover More Repositories

For information about Trinity's institutional repositories contact Amy Harrell (amy.harrell@trincoll.edu) or Amanda Matava (amanda.matava@trincoll.edu).

Preservation

  • Data sharing is not the same as data preservation. Sharing data can take many forms, including providing access to data on platforms that are very popular and useful, but do not guarantee preservation, like Github.
  • The best way to preserve your data is to deposit your data in a data repository.
  • If using another repository than those mentioned above, make sure to check what their policies are for ensuring data are regularly backed up in multiple locations, that there is a contingency plan for natural disasters, and what their migration plan is in case of a need to shut down the repository.

Plans for Long-term Storage

Explain how the data will be preserved for future use.

Are you depositing the data in a repository that will provide preservation services?

How are you preserving physical data specimens and records?

Are you requesting money in your grant to cover preservation costs?

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.

Policies for Re-use

How will the data be shared securely and safely?

Specify clearly who owns the copyright and intellectual property rights to the data. Who can reuse it and how?

How will the data be formatted and shared to make it useful for re-use?

Are you using non-proprietary data formats (.csv, for example)? Are you including instructions on how to interpret the data?

Preservation - Best Practices for Files

When selecting file formats for archiving, the formats should ideally be:
  • Non-proprietary: .docx, .xlsx, and other file formats used by Microsoft Word are proprietary and non-preferred for this reason
  • Unencrypted
  • Uncompressed
  • In common usage by the research community
  • Adherent to an open, documented standard, such as described by the State of California (see AB 1668, 2007)
    • Interoperable among diverse platforms and applications
    • Fully published and available royalty-free
    • Fully and independently implementable by multiple software providers on multiple platforms without any intellectual property restrictions for necessary technology
    • Developed and maintained by an open standards organization with a well-defined inclusive process for evolution of the standard.
Converting files to new formats:
  • Note conversion steps taken
  • If possible, keep the original file as well as the converted one 
When stating what format you'll be using:
  • Note what software is needed to view the file
  • Provide information about version control
  • Explain any anticipated format changes - such as using one file type for collection and another for analysis.