6 An overview of data sharing

The second explicit requirement associated with the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy (in addition to the Data Management and Sharing Plan requirement we discussed above) is that at the conclusion of your project, you share your project data by publishing it in a publicly facing data repository. A data repository is essentially a digital archive that is designed to preserve research data beyond the life of a given project, so that other researchers can easily reuse and build on previous research and data collection efforts. More generally, data repositories have the goal of making research data FAIR: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. Note that hosting your data on a personal website is not considered an acceptable alternative to publishing data in a public-facing repository that meets FAIR standards.

There are many different kinds of data repositories within the broader repository ecosystem:

  • General purpose repositories accept data deposits from researchers from various disciplines, regardless of their institutional affiliation. An example of a general purpose repository is the Harvard Dataverse.
  • Disciplinary repositories accept deposits from researchers from designated discipline(s) or research communities, regardless of their institutional affiliation. An example of a disciplinary or community-based repository is the Inter-university Consortium for Social and Political Research (ICPSR), which hosts data from social science researchers.
  • Institutional repositories accept data deposits from researchers who are members of a specific institution, regardless of their discipline or area of research. An example of an institutional repository is CU Scholar, which is CU-Boulder’s own institutional repository.

This guide to selecting a data repository from the NIH is a useful starting point for thinking about possible repository destinations for your research data. The NIH has also provided a catalog of repositories that might give you some more specific ideas about repository options.