Share & Publish

Plan ahead to create high-quality, shareable research data

In research projects, early planning is essential to ensure that activities are considered in detail and are organised, to ensure efficiency and successful completion of the work.

The same applies to the planning of how research data will be managed over the length of a research project and beyond. In this digital age, most research projects are data centric and therefore research needs to be planned around the data. A data management plan is therefore the ideal planning tool for researchers. Source: UK Data Service

Consideration needs to be given to

• does the publisher require authors to archive the data supporting their results in an appropriate public archive?

• archiving the data in the institutional repository and/or another repository?

• is the publication archive efficient and cost-effective in the use of public funds?

• does the archive support all data formats?

• how will the data be managed?

• will the data be open or closed to the public?

• what data citation method will be used?

In principle, there are various ways of sharing data beyond your project or research team, each with their pros and cons: 

• Email research data upon request to peers and colleagues

• Make research data available via a personal or project blog/website

• Add research data as supplementary materials to peer-reviewed journal articles - traditional or Open Access publishing

• Publish in a data journal

• Share data via a data discipline specific repository/archive

• Share data via an institutional research data repository

The latter option, i.e. sharing data via a data repository, is preferred, as it offers many benefits for researchers, the scientific community and society at large. It is the best option for ensuring that data are accessible in a sustainable manner.

Keeping data findable, understandable and effectively reusable requires some preparation and effort on your part (i.e. keeping files organized, documentation and metadata, and having the access rights and reuse permissions in place).

Ghent University. University of Pittsburgh

Persistent identifiers (PIDs) and globally unique identifiers (guid, uuid)

A PID, such as a DOI, PURL, or Handle, is a long lasting reference to a digital object. PIDs avoid broken links and difficulties to locate a dataset that is e.g. underlying a journal article. A PID uniquely identifies the digital object and ensures that it can always be located, even if its web address (URL) changes. A PID can be used for data citation (e.g. ORCID). Ghent University

Metadata

Metadata are data about data. Data must be formatted, described and cleaned to ensure that other researchers will find the datasets useful and understandable.

Metadata are a structured and machine-readable form of documentation and are key to making data FAIR. 

Metadata are managed by data repositories to enable you to search and filter the data. Moreover, online search engines can harvest (i.e. automatically collect) and index (i.e. restructure to speed up searches) metadata to enable searches across data repositories e.g. through Google or through data portals.

Controlled vocabulary, taxonomy, ontology

There are many different ways in which you can describe your data. Terminology might be ambiguous (e.g. the word “root” has a different meaning in biology and maths). Moreover, terminology might be highly domain-specific and therefore difficult to understand.

A controlled vocabulary can help to restrict the terminology that you are using to describe your data to previously defined terms. In taxonomies and ontologies, relations and/or semantics are added to the terms to increase the structure and expressiveness of the controlled vocabulary. For instance, geoNames can be used for geospatial semantic information, where the country name “France” will be connected to info such as the continent it is part of, ISO abbreviation for the country, used languages, etc.).

Using controlled vocabularies will improve the discovery (e.g. because different spelling is avoided), linking, understanding and reuse (e.g. because data can be aggregated more easily) of the data. Ghent University

Many kinds of data created as part of a research project are subject to the same rights as literary or artistic work. Such items acquire rights like copyright or more general Intellectual Property rights when they are created. This gives the rights owner control over the exploitation of their work, such as the right to copy and adapt the work, the right to rent or lend it, the right to communicate it to the public and the right to license and distribute. These rights need to be taken into account when creating, using and sharing data. UK Data Service

What is copyright, who owns it and how long does it last? Copyright is an intellectual property right assigned automatically to the creator. It prevents unauthorised copying and publishing of an original work. Copyright applies to research data and plays a role when creating, sharing and reusing data. UK Data Service

Most research outputs, such as spreadsheets, publications, reports and computer programs, fall under literary work and are therefore protected by copyright. Facts, however, cannot be copyrighted. UK Data Service

When making research data publicly available, it is important to let potential users know in advance what they are allowed to do with those data. Licensing is an effective way to communicate such permissions.

A trusted data repository will normally apply a license to any dataset it holds, which you typically select (from a list of options) when depositing data. Ghent University

Open research data

Good practice is to apply a standard and open license for open research data, as it ensures legal interoperability and the widest possible reuse.

Among the standard licenses commonly used for research data is the suite of Creative Commons (CC) licenses, which offer different levels of permission. Ghent University

Restricted data

For data requiring access restrictions, a standard license is usually not appropriate. In such cases a bespoke license will be needed instead (e.g. an ‘end user license’ or ‘user agreement’ as implemented by a trusted data repository) to make the data available. Ghent University