Sharing Data

Why Share Your Research Data?

Research data are a valuable resource, usually requiring much time and money to be produced. Many data have a significant value beyond usage for the original research.

Sharing research data:

• encourages scientific inquiry and debate
• promotes innovation and potential new data uses
• leads to new collaborations between data users and data creators
• maximizes transparency and accountability
• enables scrutiny of research findings 
• encourages the improvement and validation of research methods
• reduces the cost of duplicating data collection (and writing code)
• increases the impact and visibility of research
• promotes the research that created the data and its outcomes
• can provide a direct credit to the researcher as a research output in its own right
• provides important resources for education and training

How to Share Your Data

There are various ways to share research data, including:

• submit data to a journal to support a publication
• deposit data in an institutional data repository
• deposit data in a disciplinary domain repository
• make data available online via a project or institutional website
• make data available informally between researchers on a peer-to-peer basis

Considerations

Each of the abovementioned ways of sharing data have advantages and disadvantages. Also, how (or if you are able to) you share your research data will vary based on the nature of your data (e.g. types and characteristics) as well as disciplinary practices and research environments