4 Sharing and Preservation
Sharing data is more than presenting data in your published research paper. Sharing data means providing the data and documentation needed to reproduce your study.
Why Share Data?
- Increase research impact: those who make use of your data and cite it in their own research will help to increase your impact within your field and beyond it. Users of your data may include those in other disciplines, sectors, and countries. There is evidence that studies that make their data available receive 9%-30% more citations than those who do not (See Piowar, H. and Vision, T.J. (2013) “Data reuse and the open data citation advantage.”)
- Scientific integrity: publishing your data and citing its location in published research papers can allow others to replicate, validate, or correct your results, thereby improving the scientific record
- Your own future use: by preparing your data for sharing with others, you will benefit by being able to identify, retrieve, and understand the data yourself after you have lost familiarity with it, perhaps several years hence
- Teaching purposes: your data may be ideal for students to learn how to collect and analyze similar types of data themselves
- Funding mandates: Grant funders, public and private, are increasingly mandating data sharing so as to avoid duplication of effort and save costs (examples: Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency).
- Publisher mandates: increasingly, publishers insist that underlying data be made available both to peer reviewers and upon request by subsequent readers of the article.
(adapted from The Open University (2021). “Why Share Your Research Data?”.)
How to Share Your Data
“Final Research Data” is data generated during a project that is needed to validate or recreate the results and conclusion of the completed study. The scope of “Final Research Data” may vary between projects, and it is the responsibility of the Principal Investigator to determine and justify the scope of their Final Research Data within their Data Management Plan.
Before sharing your data, you want to properly prepare it so that the data adheres to any legal and privacy restrictions. Data should be documented so that others can effectively review and reuse the data.
You can learn more about preparing your data for sharing on the Manage Your Date guide and ICPSR’s Guide to Social Science Data Preparation and Archiving: Best Practice Throughout the Data Life Cycle (5th ed, go to “Phase 5: Preparing Data for Sharing,” pp. 36-39.).
Data Repositories
PDXScholar
PDXScholar is Portland State University’s institutional repository. We provide a local archive storage option for sharing your data sets. You can use PDXScholar to showcase your data — we can create project-specific data collection, departmental data, or data as supplemental files.
Features:
- No fees
- No file size limit
- No type/format limits
- Amazon S3 backup
- DOI – permanent, unique identifier
To submit data, please review the information needed and then email Digital Initiatives (pdxscholar@pdx.edu)
Other Data Repositories
There are a variety of data repositories, both general (e.g. Figshare) and disciplinarily focused.
In fact, there are directories to help you find a data repositories appropriate for your data, such as:
- Open Access Directory: Data Repositories by Discipline
- Repository Finder: Led by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in partnership with DataCite and the Earth, space and environment sciences community helps you find an appropriate repository to deposit your research data.
For social science data, ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) is a well recognized data repository, and Portland State is a member in this organization, which allows members of our community to deposit data in the ICPSR database.
Note that some funders and journal publishers may request that you share data via a specific repository.
