Research Guides: Scholarly Communication Support: Planning, Conducting, Disseminating, Promoting, & Assessing Research: Sharing Data

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Subjects: OER: Open (or Free) Educational Materials, Scholarly Communication

Sharing Data

Some funding agencies mandate that the data produced with their funding be made openly available. This has become more common following a 2013 memo from the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy (OSTP) which directed many federal agencies to make federally funded research articles and data freely available to the public within one year of publication. (Learn more.)

Some researchers choose to share their data without a mandate in order to benefit research in their field and bring more visibility to their contributions.

According to a report by the Pew Research Center, the majority of Americans say they are more likely to trust research when the data is openly available.

Do You Have a Data Sharing Mandate?

Sherpa Juliet
Database of funders' open-access policies, including policies regarding OA publishing, OA archiving, and data archiving.
Browse Article & Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency
From the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC)
CENDI list of Federal Agency public access plans
From CENDI, a working group of the U.S. federal government representing scientific and technical information managers in many federal agencies.

If you need or want to share your data openly, you will need to identify a repository to host that data.

Data repositories can vary widely:

Multidisciplinary versus specialized
Free versus fees
Supported data types
Policies regarding who may post/share data
Provision of DOIs or other persistent identifiers

Investigate the options carefully to determine what will be the best fit for your data.

Desirable Characteristics of Repositories for Managing and Sharing Data Resulting from Federally Funded or Supported Research
This report from the National Science and Technology Council identifies characteristics relevant to all repositories that manage and share data resulting from Federally funded research. The characteristics are organized across three themes: Organizational Infrastructure, Digital Object Management, and Technology.
Generalist Repository Comparison Chart
Compare popular options to choose the best one for your circumstances. (Research Data Alliance)
Re3Data: Registry of Research Data Repositories
Tool to search and browse for data repositories in a wide variety of subjects and disciplines.
Recommended Data Repositories List from the Journal Scientific Data
Includes some generalist and some subject-specific repositories. (Scientific Data, Springer Nature)
Qualitative Data Repository
For researchers hoping to find or host qualitative rather than quantitative data, this specialized repository from Syracuse provides a robust solution.
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Supports free deposits of digital data, worldwide dissemination, long-term preservation, and other benefits. Provides persistent identifiers.

AAU-APLU Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data
The Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) have collaborated and led national discussions to improve public access to data resulting from federally funded research. The current Guide to Accelerate Public Access to Research Data builds on many prior efforts and is consistent with national and global open science efforts as well as international declarations, such as the Sorbonne declaration on research data rights.
Sorbonne Declaration on Research Data Rights (2020)
"On 27 January [2020], the International Summit on Research Data Rights was held at the Sorbonne University, where the “Sorbonne Declaration” on research data rights was signed. The text affirms the willingness of universities to share data and make appropriate use of it, and calls on governments to adopt a legal framework to regulate this exchange and provide the means to implement it. The aim is to make data accessible to accelerate scientific discovery and economic development."

Graph of data from Pew Research Center showing that majority of Americans say they are more apt to trust research when the data is openly available