Research Data Management : Data Sharing: Home

Sharing research data is an increasingly expected part of scholarly communication called for by funders, publishers and institutional policies. It benefits science, society and researchers.  Data are shared so that they become discoverable, available, and reusable while data provenance and attribution are tracked. Despite public release, your can still define the terms of data reuse if you license your data properly. Preparing your data for reuse, either by your future self or others, takes effort and is done easier with some planning ahead. 

While you can share your data on your own website or as supplementary material in journal publications, publishing them in a data repository comes with additional long term benefits. They provide long term preservation for your data, help support discovery of data, promote good citation practices and satisfy funder and publisher data-sharing mandates. You can still "make your data sharing count" by releasing them as citable scientific publication in a Data Journal. 

Nevertheless, finding and selecting the appropriate research data repository (code repositories included) to submit your work can be challenging. Some academic communities have established discipline specific data repositories and have already developed some maturity on integrating activities with multiple systems within the research communication ecosystem. Many more disciplines though don’t have easily available options for archiving and supporting long time online access. In this case, you may consider KAUST Repository or an external general purpose repository to upload your data.

With this guide we aim to assist you in addressing most of your concerns about making the choice to share your data, prepare for it and find the appropriate repository to do so.