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Data management: Repositories and sharing

Repositories and sharing

Questions about repositories and sharing? Please contact forskersupport@kb.dk 

Data storage at RUC

re3data.org

re3data.org

DataCite Commons

Locate, identify, and cite research data with the leading global provider of DOIs for research data.

Sharing

When sharing your data you need to decide where to share it. Some institutions have their own data repositories, but this is not the case at Roskilde University. The two most important public multidisciplinary data repositories (Zenodo and Figshare) are listed to the right. Both are free to use. Also listed (to the left) is a catalogue, re3data, to more than 2000 different data repositories.

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

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

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

DOI's 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 DOI's.

Zenodo and Figshare as well as other repositories issue DOI's to research data sets.

DOI example: 10.5281/zenodo.820919

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. There are three types of metadata: Descriptive (bibliographic), administrative, including technical, as well as structural. Descriptive metadata is used for retrieval and identification of research data and describes the intellectual content, the intellectual origin and details regarding the data. Administrative metadata represent management information, date of change of research data, technical metadata and rights and license information. Structural metadata is used to indicate the internal structure of a dataset.

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.

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.