Sharing Data

Why share data?

• Meet funding agency requirements
• Support transparency and reproducibility
• Increase the visibility of research
• Get cited

Where can I deposit and share my data?

• Disciplinary data repositories. By sharing your data through an established disciplinary repository, you can associate it with related content, make it easier to discover, and use standards associated with your discipline.
  • Find repositories
    • Nature Recommended Data Repositories
    • PLOS Recommended Repositories
    • re3data.org – Registry of Research Data Repositories
• General Data Repositories. These repositories accept data from a range of disciplines. Most offer a DOI, allow depositors to create basic metadata, and have a plan for preserving data. A few charge a fee. Please see Assessing Cross Disciplinary Data Repositories for a comparison of different options.
  • Dryad Digital Repository
  • Figshare
  • Harvard Dataverse
  • Mendeley Data
  • Open ICPSR
  • Open Science Framework
  • Zenodo
• Rice Research Repository (R-3). You may publish final datasets through Rice’s digital repository, which can provide a DOI and preservation services. Contact researchdata@rice.edu for more information. The Rice Research Repository is intended for small to medium datasets.

How can others use my data (licensing and intellectual property)?

• See Rice’s Research Data Management Policy for information about intellectual property rights and research data.
• To facilitate further research, we recommend sharing data under open licenses where possible, particularly CC0 (public domain). For more information on data licensing and open data licenses, see:
  • Open Data Commons
  • How to License Research Data
  • The Open Data Handbook

What should I consider before sharing data?

Before you make your data publicly available, consider:

• Whether there are privacy concerns. If your data contains information about human subjects, you will need to include data sharing plans in your IRB and make sure that data are de-identified. See the guidance from the NIH and ICPSR.
• Whether the dataset is proprietary. If so, it may be possible to negotiate with the data owner to allow summary-level data to be shared.
• Whether there are computer security or export control issues.
  
  Contact the Office of Research Compliance for assistance with these issues.

How can I get credit for my data?

• Proper citation of data sets ensures that your work is credited and facilitates linking publications with data.
  • Why cite data?
  • Linking datasets to publications