Open data
Research data made openly available through suitable repositories becomes searchable, citable and gives the authors more opportunities for impact, merit and future collaborations. Publishing and making research data openly available increases transparency and reliability of presented results and publications. It also gives others the opportunity to find and reuse existing data in new research.
Restricted access
There may be legal and/or ethical reasons not to share or publish research data. This applies, for example, to data that contains personal data and which is then subject to the Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or other legislation. This may also apply to information that is classified under OSL (SFS 2009:400), contains business secrets, is copyrighted by someone else or contains other information that should not be disseminated for other legal or ethical reasons. Although some data cannot be directly shared, published or made publicly available, you can still register the data with rich metadata in data repositories and thereby make it searchable and reusable. You can also specify the contact persons and the conditions and conditions that exist for accessing the data. In this way you can increase the "FAIRness" of the data, since metadata and metadata standards are central to the FAIR principles.
Repositories and Identifiers
There are a number of national and international data repositories that can be used for publishing data. If possible choose an established subject-based repository. In the re3data.org register (Registry of research data repositories), you can search for data repositories in various subject areas and countries.
You can also find a list of subject-specific repositories at The Open Access Directory (OAD). The Open Access Directory (OAD) In your choice of subject repository you can also take part in recommendations and guides that many publishers offer, e.g. Nature.
Some examples of subject-specific repositories are:
- CESSDA – social science.
- DARIAH – humanities.
- ELIXIR – life science. Here you will find Elixir’s list of recommended databases, e.g. BioStudies.
- HEPData –high-energy physics.
- NOMAD – material science.
- SBDI – biodiversity.
- SICAS Medical Image Repository – medicine.
When choosing a repository, check the guidelines of your journal, publisher or funder for sharing and publishing data. The European Commission recommends that researchers use certified repositories that support open data.
One advantage of subject-specific repositories is that the metadata fields are more detailed, and by using subject specific vocabulary, the description of the material is better. General data repositories can have the advantage of giving data greater multidisciplinary reach.
The fact that repositories have machine-readable metadata and accepted metadata standards also increases the possibility of reuse and distribution.
Choose preferably a repository that gives your data persistent identifiers (PIDs), such as the DOI. Read more about identifiers below.
Examples of interdisciplinary repositories where researchers at Uppsala University can make research data openly available whithout cost:
- Doris – Swedish National Data Service is a research infrastructure operated by a consortium of nine universities in Sweden. In the SND repository, certified against CoreTrustSeal you can publish data sets and metadata. Use your university credentials to login. In the SND registration form for the dataset it is possible to search and link to publications registered in DiVA or in SwePub. When you publish a data set in the SND repository it is assigned a persistent identifier, DOI, and it becomes searchable in SND's catalogue, Web of Science, and DataCite. Data sets deposited at the SND repository are described according to the DDI metadata standard (Data Documentation Initiative). Learn more about how to register data sets in DORIS.
Data sets published in Doris are reviewed by staff at the Uppsala University Research Data Support in dialogue with responsible researchers. The aim is to make published data more FAIR. - DiVA The institutional repository for Uppsala University.
Please observe that from the 15th of May, it will no longer be possible to register data sets in DiVA. We recommend you to publish your data in the SND repository, Doris, instead. The existing data sets in DiVA will be transferred to the SND after 15 May. Then URN:NBN is redirected for the moved entries so that the links point to the entries in DORIS instead. - Zenodo A repository operated by OpenAIRE and CERN, funded by the European Commission - open to all researchers. Zenodo can be used for storing and sharing data sets, software code and other research data. When it comes to software code, you can use Zenodo to store a copy in Github and assign a DOI-number for code in Github.
- Figshare An open data repository, a part of Digital Science.
- Dryad Created by National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, UNC-CH Metadata Reserach Center, Oxford University, The British Library and California Digital Library.
- GitHub Microsoft (company).
- Dataverse, Harvard University.
It is also possible to make the datasets available as supplementary material when you publish an article or via data journals. SND has a list of data journals in various fields.
Identifiers for published data
When published in a repository, a data set assigns a unique and permanent identifier, a PID (persistent identifier). PIDs are machine-readable and durable over time unlike URL links. A PID consists of a unique ID number or a code string. Different types of PIDs are used depending on what is to be identified and the organization behind them. A PID can lead to a landing page where data is described, to files or documents or used to identify individuals and organizations. Some examples include DOI (for data and publications), ORCID (for researchers and academics), ISBN (for books) and ISSN (for journals) and ROR (for scientific organizations).
Please note that when publishing a data set, specified authors and roles may be different from those specified in publications whose analysis and results are based on this data. For examples of roles see CRediT – Contributor Roles Taxonomy. FORCE11 and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), provide recommendations on issues relating to copyright for data sets.