Data Sharing
Data sharing is essential for the expedited translation of scholarly works into knowledge, products, and procedures. It is increasingly common for data to be shared after the completion of a project, a phenomenon this is being driven by data policies from journals and funders.
Why Share?
Compliance
- With funding organizations that require data management plans and data accessibility.
- With journals requiring supporting data files to accompany manuscripts.
- Read these tips on complying with new policies for sharing data, published in Science.
Research Benefits
- Find your own data years after you finish a project.
- Enable others to replicate your work and build confidence around your contributions.
- Enable others to conduct new analyses sourced in your data.
Career Benefits
- Data citation is becoming a publishing standard, and standardized data repositories generate a data citation when you deposit your data. Thus, sharing your data in a repository acknowledges your contribution to the work.
- To create incentives for data sharing, some are developing and advocating for tools that track sharing of data and that formally credit investigators that share data:
Where?
Options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication are common and include government-sponsored repositories, discipline-related repositories, and third-party repositories.
In addition, UIW provides a free, open-access data repository available to all members of the UIW community - Athenaeum. When considering this resource, please read the UIW Library Data Repository Policy and include a reference to it in your plan.
Athenaeum supports open data, data that is free to use, reuse, and redistribute - subject only, at most, to the requirements of attribution and share-alike ( Open Data Handbook).
If you are looking for alternative data repositories, the Registry of Research Data Repositories may be the place to find a data repository to fit your project.