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Data management: Repositories and sharing

Sharing

SHARING RESEARCH DATA

When sharing your data you need to decide where to share it. The two most important public multidisciplinary data repositories (Zenodo and Figshare) are listed on the right. Both are free to use. A catalogue of data repositories is re3data, with almost 3000 different data repositories. From 2025, RUC's researchers will be able to use RUC Dataverse for research data, that do not contain personal data. 

You also need to consider licensing your data. In many repositories you will have the option to choose from several license types. If you want to share your work and give more rights to your data than the traditional copyrights, you may consider Creative Commons (CC) licenses. CC licenses provide a simple, standardized way to give permission to others to share and use your research data on your conditions. Read more here.

Persistent identifiers

DIGITAL OBJECT IDENTIFIER

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is used to uniquely identify academic, professional, and government information, such as journal articles, research reports and data sets. DOIs are widely used, resolvable, and remain fixed as opposed to URLs.

DOIs are based on a ISO standard and are backed by the International DOI foundation (IDF). Only members of the federation of registration agencies coordinated by IDF can issue DOIs.

Zenodo and Figshare as well as other repositories issue DOIs to research data sets.

DOI example: 10.5281/zenodo.820919

Information about data

METADATA

"Metadata is data that provides information about other data" (1).

Metadata is a common term for many different types of structured information used to describe, manage and retrieve for example research data. Metadata to include with research data are e.g. titel, abstract, author, affiliation, file formats, version, DOI, keywords.   

It is recommended to use a recognized standard for metadata, both in terms of content (content format) and structure (data format). It makes it easier to exchange data with other users and systems. The DataCite metadata schema is such a standard, and used by many research data repositories such as the two mentioned to the right (Zenodo and Figshare). Read more about this schema at datacite.org.

(1) "Metadata." Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 2 Nov. 2018.

Dataverse

DEIC - RUC DATAVERSE

The Danish e-Infrastructure Consortium (DeiC) will offer all researchers at the Danish Universities the possibility to publish and archive their research data in 2025 in DeiC Dataverse. Each university will have a designated collection within the platform, in which they administer their own users and contents, e.g. RUC Dataverse. More info will follow soon. 

Zenodo

Zenodo

Multidisciplinary research data repository created by OpenAIRE and CERN. Zenodo uses the same cloud infrastructure as CERN's own LHC research data. Stored data sets get a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to make them easily and uniquely citeable. Zenodo uses a subset of the DataCite metadata schema.

Figshare

figshare.com

This data repository is owned by Digital Science. It allows integration with ORCID and stored data sets get a DOI. Figshare covers all disciplines and all file formats.