End of project

Publication and archiving: Data journals and repositories

Research data can either be published or should at least be saved in a safe storage location. There are many discipline-specific repositories and databases that make it possible to archive research data. Data journals are available for publishing data. The following possibilities or requirements exist for publishing or archiving research data:

• Publication as a supplement or annex to a research article in a scientific journal (e.g. Nature):

Nowadays in a publication, besides additional figures, tables, and detailed information about methods, a supplement to  a research article can also be published that includes the corresponding research data.  Many scientists are probably already aware of this possibility. 

• Publication in a data journal:

The focus of data journals is not on the interpretation of the data but on the description of independent datasets or data collections that have first been published in a reliable data repository. Data papers describe the data collection process and give detailed information about the instruments and methods used. When re-using the data, the data paper and dataset must be cited. Published research data packages can be found and cited with assigned persistent identifiers, e.g. DOIs. Usually, they also go through a review process. Examples are the Earth System Science Data (ESSD) journal or the online journal Scientific Data from the Nature Publishing Group.

• Publication/archiving in a research data repository:

There are various types of repositories: Discipline repositories and general repositories, for example in the form of institutional offers. In repositories, datasets are published as independent objects for which varying access rights can be set. If the datasets are then linked to a “persistent identifier,” they can be permanently identified and found.

Discipline-specific repositories (selection)

Agricultural and natural sciences:

• PUBLISSO
• DRYAD
• GenBank
• Open Agrar
• PANGEA

Business, economics, and social sciences:

• CESSDA
• CLARIAH-DE
• SSRN
• MPRA
• ECONSTOR
• Psychdata
• DARIAH-DE
• GESIS

Further search options for discipline-specific repositories:

• B2SHARE
• figshare
• Zenodo
• RADAR
• re3data.org - Registry of Research Data Repositories
• OpenDOAR - Directory of Open Access Repositories

 Certificates for repositories.

Certificates give data producers the assurance that the data is available, usable, and citable in the long term. Data users can rely on a minimum level of quality (data format, citability, etc.) of the data stored in certified repositories.

Licenses

Research data are typically not subject to independent legal protection, but it is possible to limit later use with a usage license. With free licenses, for example, the authors can set the terms of use for re-using the research data they produced. Suitable Creative Commons licenses can be selected using a list of criteria. For Open Access, this means that a collection of measurement data can be given a license that allows for the most freedom of use.

Besides Creative Commons licenses, there are also other free licenses. Types of free licenses include:

• Creative Commons (CC)
• GNU General Public License (GPL) / specialized for software
• Open Data Commons (ODC) / specialized for data collections

More information can be found here: Advantages of free licenses

Long-term archiving

Available services

bwDataArchiv (Usage agreement in planning)

More information can be found here (in German): Long-term archiving