1. Check your funder data sharing policy
A helpful overview of funders’ publication and data policies and the support they provide is available from the Digital Curation Centre. Note that ESRC currently have the most explicit guidelines for sharing data. As of January 2023, NIH will require Data Management Plans to be submitted with proposals and complied with.
2. Choose a data repository
There are many discipline specific repositories available. There are also general repositories such as OSF, Dryad and Figshare. Some funders may specify particular repositories and cost may be an issue if storing large amounts of data. There are also several external services which provide data storage for open data.
Available data repositories include:
- Dryad Digital Repository
- Figshare
- Harvard Dataverse
- Open Science Framework
- Zenodo
- Mendeley Data
- Science Data bank
Lists of additional data repositories can be found at re3data and the fairsharing page.
A repository finder tool is also available at the Datacite Repository finder.
Where a suitable repository cannot be found and the dataset is small, users can deposit datasets in Pure. Guidance on how to add a dataset to Pure is available here
3. License your data
It is important to license your data to make it FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
Which licence will depend on whether your data are files or software. See here for information on Open Data Licensing.
4. Develop a data availability statement
This should include details of where to access your data e.g. a repository. Don't forget to include a DOI and any access restrictions.
5. Submit your data to PURE
Even if you store your data externally, please also submit to PURE so we have a record of where your data is held.