Repositories
Repositories are platforms for depositing and sharing data, and thereby obviously also a source to find data for potential re-use. They ensure long-term availability of data and generally provide persistent identifiers (mainly DOI) for data citation.
Repositories can be distinguished in general (accepting a wide range of data from any scientist), institutional (also often content covering a wide range of scientific fields but data upload limited to a certain institution) or discipline-specific.
Discipline-specific repositories are recommended, as they provide more opportunities (but also obligations) to document data according to the needs and standards of a scientific field. Data are also more likely to be discovered by other scientists working in the same or closely related fields. re3data.org is particularly recommended for the search. Of course, there are other overview sites that are also suitable for finding a suitable repository.
As an institutional repository for the Max Planck Society, for example, the service Edmond service can be used by als Max Planck researcher.
Two general repositories, which have a wide distribution, are Zenodo and Dryad.
Collections of Repositories
The number of data repositories keeps increasing. re3data.org currently lists more than 2000 repositories. This compilation can be browsed by subject, content type, or country, and further searched by e.g. type of data access (open, restricted, embargoed, closed) or metadata standards (generic e.g. Dublin Core and/or discipline-specific).
Examples of Repository Collections
| Collection Institution | Link |
|---|---|
| re3data | https://www.re3data.org/ |
| Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft | https://www.dfg.de/en/research_funding/proposal_review_decision/applicants/research_data/index.html |
| OpenDOAR | https://v2.sherpa.ac.uk/opendoar/ |
| PeerJ | https://peerj.com/about/policies-and-procedures/#data-materials-sharing |
| PLoS ONE | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/recommended-repositories |
| Scientific Data by Springer Nature | https://www.nature.com/sdata/policies/repositories |
Data Journal
Data Journals are a relatively recent option for describing and documenting data, with such outputs being peer-reviewed and receiving a status comparable to conventional scientific manuscripts. The research context will be provided without a detailed interpretation of the underlying data. The data themselves are generally deposited in a repository and linked from the data paper. Some data journals also accept articles describing data services or best practices in data sharing.
A collection of Journal Data Policies is keeped updated by the Harvard University.
Collections of Data Journals
| Collection Institution | Link |
|---|---|
| Australian National Data Service | https://www.ands.org.au/working-with-data/publishing-and-reusing-data/data-journals |
| Directory of Open Access Journals | https://doaj.org |
| Forschungsdaten.org | https://www.forschungsdaten.org/index.php/Data_Journals |
| FOSTER Consortium | https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/taxonomy/term/114 |
| Humboldt-University Berlin | https://www.cms.hu-berlin.de/de/dl/dataman/teilen/dokumentation/datajournal/datajournal |
| MIT Library | https://libraries.mit.edu/data-management/share/journal-requirements/ |
| University of Edinburgh | https://www.wiki.ed.ac.uk/display/datashare/Sources+of+dataset+peer+review |
| University of Pittsburgh | https://pitt.libguides.com/findingdata/datajournals |
Further Readings
Buddenbohm S., de Jong M., Minel J.-L., Moranville Y. (2020): Find Research Data Repositories for the Humanities – The Data Deposit Recommendation Service, hal-03020703v2.
Candela, L., Castelli, D., Manghi, P., & Tani, A. (2015): Data journals – A survey: Data Journals: A Survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(9), 1747–1762. doi:10.1002/asi.23358.
Kindling and Strecker (2022): List of data journals, Zenodo. doi:10.5281/zenodo.7082126.
Milzow, K., von Arx, M., Sommer, C., Cahenzli, J., & Perini, L. (2020). Open Research Data: SNSF monitoring report 2017-2018, doi:10.5281/zenodo.3618123.
Lates News relating to Repositories and Data Journals
- FAIR-DI Award for Data Handling in a PhD Thesis
- Onboarding Courses for Research Data Management for Max Planck Early Career Researchers in Spring 2024
- Research Data within the New Rules of Conduct for Good Scientific Practice by the Max Planck Society
- Decentralized Identifiers for Research Data
