Deposit your data!
A big advantage of sharing research data by depositing them in an archive or repository is that they will be preserved - even for your own future use.
University data repository
Edinburgh DataShare is an institutional data repository set up by the Data Library to allow University researchers to deposit, share, and license their data resources for online discovery and use by others, either openly or on a restricted basis. Resources are managed according to a written preservation policy.
The Library offers guidance to PhD students on submitting their thesis and associated data to the University and whether to allow the thesis to be openly shared. Postgraduate students may choose to share their data openly through Edinburgh DataShare, with a link to their thesis in the Publications Repository.
National services
Some of the national research councils fund data services to curate, disseminate, and preserve data created as part of their funded programmes. Examples are the Economic and Social Research Council's UK Data Archive (also known as Economic and Social Data Service) and the designated data centres from the Natural Environment Research Council.
If you have created teaching materials around research data for use by students, these can be deposited in Jorum, a national repository of learning objects for UK Higher and Further Education.
- Depositing in the UK Data Archive (for ESRC grant-holders)
- Natural Environment Research Council Data Centres
- Jorum learning object repository
This article was published on Feb 1, 2012