Research Guides: Research Data Management: Sharing Your Data

Providing Public Access to Data

These are just some of the repositories that can be used to provide funder mandated Public Access to the digital data that supports your papers. Please contact the Research Data Management Team at libdatahelp@vcu.edu.

DataONE
Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered observational Earth data.
Dryad
DataDryad.org is a curated general-purpose repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad has integrated data submission for a growing list of journals; submission of data from other publications is also welcome.
figshare
figshare allows users to upload any file format to be made visualisable in the browser so that figures, datasets, media, papers, posters, presentations and filesets can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Archive of social science data for research and instruction. Includes data files for use with statistical software, such as SAS or SPSS. Topical archives include health, aging, education, criminal justice, and substance abuse.
more...less...
(1962 - present) VCU access only
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
DNA, RNA and protein sequences as well as data from Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO), Database of Genotypes and Phenotypes (dbGaP) and more.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories
The NIH supports many repositories, listed and linked on this site. If you are funded by one of the National Institutes of Health, find your Institute in this list for recommended repositories.
Open Science Framework
OSF allows you to have both public and private versions of your study. Once you have de-identified data in an OSF-hosted study, you can register the study and share it for your data sharing compliance. See our guide on OSF for more information at http://guides.library.vcu.edu/OSF
Re3Data
Not sure where to share your data? Look up a list of disciplinary specialty repositories for a wide range of purposes at Re3Data. This website lets you search data sharing platforms and sort through them for specific functions like data file types, specific sharing policies, and more.
Scholars Compass (VCU)
Deposit your publications/data in VCU Scholars Compass, the institutional repository for Virginia Commonwealth University, to disseminate your work to a global audience.

Organizing your Data for Sharing

Even if you deposit your data, it is a good idea to keep your article pdf, doc*, and data together in a folder.

The Readme file should have all the background information about the data so anyone who looks at the data can figure out how you analyzed it to get your results (more in Organizing and Documenting Your Data). This is part of the Rigor and Reproducibility policy the NIH is promoting.

This is how your folder might look in your computer files:

You can use a similar organization in Google Drive:

*Keep the final peer-reviewed manuscript in case you need to deposit it for public access, not all publishers remember to deposit articles, even if you have indicated you are grant funded (see Compliance Research Guide for more).