CSUSM Library Guides: Data Management and Sharing: Repositories

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Why Sharing?

There are several reasons why you might want to share your data. The most obvious is that some funding agencies are requiring that all data they fund be publicly available and shareable. Several journals are also requiring that data be publicly available as a condition of publication. You might want to share your data to build your professional network and build opportunities for collaboration. It's also a way to move research and discoveries forward more quickly by allowing others to build and expand on the work that you have already done.

Many people think that sharing their data on their personal website or by putting "data available upon request" is the best way to make it available. But it isn't! There are several data repositories that are specifically built to share data. Making your data available in a repository means less work for you over the long run by maintaining the access for others without you having to manually manage every request individually.

General Data Repositories

How to Choose a Repository

When selecting a repository, researchers should consider the following:

Where are similar datasets preserved?
What are the access and use policies for the repository?
How long will the data be kept? How long should it be kept?
Who manages the repository? An institution? A commercial provider?
What are the costs associated with using the repository? How will these costs be paid?
Are there policies in place for replication, monitoring, disaster recovery, and business continuity?

Data should be submitted to discipline-specific, community-recognized repositories where possible, or to generalist repositories if no suitable community resource is available.

Source: NISO Primer: Research Data Management.

General Repositories

Dataverse Project

Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others' work more easily. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility.

Dryad

Dryad is a curated general-purpose repository that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad has integrated data submission for a growing list of journals; submission of data from other publications is also welcome.

Figshare

Figshare is a repository where users can make all of their research outputs available in a citable, shareable, and discoverable manner. It allows users to upload any file format to be previewed in the browser so that any research output, from posters and presentations to datasets and code, can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow

Mendeley Data

Mendeley Data is a place where researchers can upload and share their research data for free. Datasets can be shared privately amongst individuals, as well as published to share with the world.

ScholarWorks

ScholarWorks is a shared institutional repository that collects, preserves, and provides access to scholarship by research communities at The California State University. Collections include CSU faculty publications, student dissertations and theses, datasets, and teaching materials.

Zenodo

Zenodo enables researchers to share and preserve any research outputs in any size, any format, from any discipline.

Repository Directories

Repository Directories and Recommendations

Nature Recommended Data Repositories
Repositories included on this page have been evaluated to ensure that they meet Nature's requirements for data access, preservation and stability.
Open Access Directory Data Repositories
This is a list of repositories and databases for open data arranged by subject.
re3data.org
This is the largest and most comprehensive registry of research data repositories with over 1,500 repositories listed. The registry covers a wide range of disciplines from around the world.

Repositories by Discipline

Repositories for the Sciences

CaNanoLab
caNanoLab is a data sharing portal designed to facilitate information sharing across the international biomedical nanotechnology research community to expedite and validate the use of nanotechnology in biomedicine.
HEPData
The Durham High Energy Physics Database (HEPData) has been built up over the past four decades as a unique open-access repository for scattering data from experimental particle physics.
The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB)
The Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB) is an international repository intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research. Due to rich contextual information provided with KNB data, scientists are able to integrate and analyze data with less effort.
NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) hosts and provides access to one of the most significant archives on earth, with comprehensive oceanic, atmospheric, and geophysical data.
ORNL DAAC for Biogeochemical Dynamics
The ORNL DAAC is a data center in NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System. The mission of the ORNL DAAC is to assemble, distribute, and provide data services for a comprehensive archive of terrestrial biogeochemistry and ecological dynamics observations and models to facilitate research, education, and decision-making in support of NASA's Earth Science.
RDoCdb
RDoCdb supports the National Institute of Mental Health's Research Domain Criteria Initiative (RDoC), which calls for the development, for research purposes, of new ways of classifying psychopathology based on dimensions of observable behavior and neurobiological measures. RDoCdb provides the research community a data repository for the harmonization and sharing of research data related to this initiative, and also accepts and shares human subjects data related to all fields of mental health research.
SIMBAD Astronomical Database - CDS
The purpose of SIMBAD is to provide information on astronomical objects of interest which have been studied in scientific articles. It provides the bibliography, as well as available basic information.

Repositories for the Social Sciences

ICPSR
ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. ICPSR collaborates with a number of funders, including U.S. statistical agencies and foundations.
OpenICPSR
OpenICPSR stores social and behavioral science research data. Your data will be preserved as-is and will be available to data users at no cost. openICPSR is undergoing development and is currently free for all users to share their data up to a 2GB limit.
UK Data Archive
The UK's largest collection of digital research data in the social sciences. They are open to any data collection which may be of use to social scientists and historians, whether large or small scale, in most formats.

Repositories for the Humanities

Archaeology Data Service
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) supports research, learning and teaching with freely available, high quality and dependable digital resources. They do this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology.
National Archive of Data of Arts & Culture
The National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC) is a repository that facilitates research on arts and culture by acquiring data, particularly those funded by federal agencies and other organizations, and sharing those data with researchers, policymakers, people in the arts and culture field, and the general public.
ORTOLANG
ORTOLANG's aim is to construct a network infrastructure including a repository of language data (corpora, lexicons, dictionaries etc.) and readily available, well-documented tools for its processing.
VADS
VADS (the Visual Arts Data Service) has provided services to the academic community for 20 years and has built up a considerable portfolio of visual art collections comprising over 140,000 images that are freely available and copyright cleared for use in learning, teaching and research.

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Data Management and Sharing