Dissemination of your data has intrinsic benefits. Sharing your data can broaden your own connections and networks, lead to unexpected findings and increase efficiency. Some of the most common immediate benefits include:
It is important to note that there is a difference in sharing your data, granting access to your data, and sharing information about your data.
While we encourage you to share your data openly, we remain committed to the principle of "as open as possible, as closed as necessary". Sharing information about your data, such as the metadata or the data about your data, can help another researcher determine if your data may be helpful to them. This allows them options to try and gain access if needed. Having steps set up in your data management plan to grant access for different reasons determined by you or by included communities will mean you do not have to create them in the moment, and possibly miss something important.
Māori data sovereignty, is another important aspect to remember when considering your data sharing. See the guide for more info.
The FAIR principles are intended to help you make your data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The emphasis is on setting your data up to be suitable for computer systems to find, access, interoperate, and reuse data with minimal human intervention. Efficiency and ease of use for both humans and computers is foundational.
Both data and metadata should be easy to find for both humans and computers, with machine-readable metadata being essential for automatic discovery of datasets.
Once data is found, it needs to be accessed which may include authentication, authorisation, and terms and conditions.
The data should be able to be integrated with other data, and be able to work across different applications/software, workflows, storage and processing needs. Robustly structured data is key for this.
FAIR's aim is for data to be optimised to be reused after you are done with it. For this to be achieved, metadata and data should be well described so that it can be replicated, combined or used in various settings.
Find out more about FAIR:
Many research funders, and publishers, require data to be shared along with publication of any research outputs such as journal articles. In some cases, simply having the data findable (but not accessible) is enough, while in other cases they may require access too. Carefully read the requirements of your funder and possible publisher before selecting a place for publication. Publishers will usually require that the data have a separate DOI, which can be granted by most of the common data repositories.
The requirements from publishers are often specific to that publisher. See the examples below for the data availability statements of three large publishers:
Publishing your data is usually done via repositories. Some data repositories are subject specific, while others are more general. When investigating which data repository is best for your data, consider all the previous decisions and factors that went into creating your data management plan. It may be that the file type, dataset size, metadata, or access requirements are a reason to pick one repository over another. Cost is also a factor, as is duration of storage and other features the repository has.
The University of Waikato does not have a specific deal with any data repositories. We can recommend some common options that other researchers have used:
You can also search through registries of research data repositories such as:
For assistance, reach out to the Open Research Team at library@waikato.ac.nz.