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University Library DePaul Library

Research Data Management (A How-to Guide): Data Sharing

Getting started with managing your research data

Data Sharing

Similar to scholarly article citation, sharing your research data and allowing other researchers to download, use, and cite your data can lead to your research having a greater impact in your field.

Sharing your data has the following benefits:

  • Reputation enhancement through citations of your data from other researchers
  • Grant compliance for data to be openly accessible
  • Contributions to the broader knowledge base in your discipline
  • Data that is submitted to an open repository will be indexed and open to search engines for easy discovery, and will have a persistent and stable link for access
  • Open data sets lead to a greater number of research paper citations

The Force11 community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers, and research funders have come up with Data Publishing guidelines using the acronym FAIR. 

  • Data should be Findable
  • Data should be Accessible
  • Data should be Interoperable
  • Data should be Re-usable

Which federal funding agencies have a data sharing requirement?

There are many different repositories into which you can deposit your data. Here is just a sample:

Data Repositories by Subject
Multidisciplinary

figshare

Dataverse
Earth and Environmental Science Data

DataOne Members

Dryad

Open Science Framework (OSF)
Social Science Data openICPSR