Subject and Course Guides: Open Data: Options for Researchers: Your Options

The Libraries Can Help You

write and implement your data management plan to best meet funder requirements.
find and use others' data or government data.

Options by Openness: Sharing Data That...

Open data provides avenues for true reproducibility, citizen science, and improved decision making for individuals and entities across the globe (e.g., business owners, policy-makers, and individuals and their own health). To contribute your data openly, it is best practice to develop a data management plan before beginning your research to determine how best to be able to reuse and distribute your data upon completion and to publish data and supporting materials CC0 (or CC-BY) in a data repository. Here are some of the features of a data repository:

Provides an avenue for developing comprehensive metadata
Creates citations and assigns a DOI to your dataset(s)
Enables you to determine usage
Provides Long-term preservation and storage of your data

For assistance with choosing a repository and with meeting a repository's deposit requirements, please contact the Research Data Services department at dataCAVE@uta.edu.

Relying on your own, your lab’s, your department’s, or even some campus-wide IT resources or services can be risky. Unless the service offers an explicit commitment to long-term preservation of content, your data are liable to disappear if you change institutions or retire, funding stops, or technology policies or platforms change.

Resources:

MavMatrix
The repository for UTA datasets and related files. All disciplines and all affiliates are welcome.
Re3Data - Registry of Research Data Repositories
A global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines.

Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) This link opens in a new window
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) is a membership-based, not-for-profit organization serving member colleges and universities by providing access to a large database of machine-readable social science data sets.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) in a not-for-profit organization providing social sciences quantitative data sets. Subjects in this database include: political science, sociology, demography, history, economics, communication, international relations, gerontology, public health, criminal justice, and education. The archives include almost all major social science studies, including American National Election Study, Eurobarometer, General Social Survey and International Social Survey Program, decennial Census of Population and Housing, Voter News Service exit polls, US Congressional and UN roll call votes, National Crime Victimization Survey, and public opinion polls. Numeric data sets and documentation are contributed by government agencies, organization, research centers, and individual researchers.

Dryad
Biological data collection service run by University of North Carolina Metadata Research Center
arXiv.org
Started in August 1991, arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a highly-automated electronic archive and distribution server for research articles.

Not all research data can be made openly available. Here are some options for limiting availability or openness of your data in a way that still allows sharing.

Licensing - Publishing data with a copyright or with Creative Commons licensing allows you to share your data publicly without releasing your rights to the dataset. This is referred to as public access.
Embargo - one of the most common methods of ensuring first access to your data is through delaying open or public access to your data by a specified amount of time.
Partial dataset - data can be shared partially to allow others to understand what may be available and then they can contact you for the full dataset. Sampling in order to share partial datasets is also a way of protecting confidentiality of human subjects.

For help with exploring options for making your data public, please contact the Research Data Services department at dataCAVE@uta.edu.

You can reach researchers interested in your data even if it is not shared openly or publicly. Some options include

Sharing interactive visualizations through resources like Tableau, CartoDB, or GitHub pages. While individuals can interact with your data, they do not have access to the raw data. (Here is an example.)
Publishing the metadata, or information about the data you have. Many data repositories also provide this as an option, and researchers who are interested can contact you directly for your data. When they contact you, you also have options:
- Data use agreements can be used when sending a researcher data. These can outline expected conduct and hold individuals accountable related to the data and can also specify consequences of misuse.
- Sending analysis - For data that absolutely cannot be shared, researchers can send you the analysis, you can run it on your data and return just the results to them.

For help with exploring options for potentially increasing awareness of your data, please contact the Research Data Services department at dataCAVE@uta.edu.

Before sharing, consider the following:

Do your data contain confidential or private personal information? If you anonymize, can individuals in the dataset be reidentified?
Are your datasets understandable to those who wish to use them? Have you included all the metadata, methodology descriptions, codebooks, data dictionaries, and other descriptive material that someone looking at the dataset for the first time would need?
Do your datasets comply with description, format, metadata, and sharing standards in your field?
What are the data sharing requirements of the journal in which you plan to publish an article?
What reuse policies do you wish for your data? Consider the Panton Principles carefully before you attach reuse restrictions.