Publish research data
Research data generated and collected for a specific project may have potential value beyond its original intent. Where research data is available, this improves the transparency of the research and allows results to be reproduced and validated. An increasing number of funders are requiring data arising from projects to be openly published. Additionally, some publishers now requires data supporting any articles published made publicly available.
Exceptions are generally only made in the case of confidential data, only if the data cannot be sufficiently anonymized.
Options for publishing your data include:
- In a repository or data archive
Depositing research data in a data archive or repository increases the discoverability of the data as well as satisfying funder and journal publisher data policy requirements. Re3data.org offers an overview of data repositories. If you want to make research data available for the long term, the data should be made accessible, discoverable and fit for re-use on a stable location which can be cited and for which statistics can be collected. TU Delft offers 4TU.ResearchData for doing just that.
Find more information on the 'Publish' page on how to prepare and publish research data in a FAIR manner prior to depositing the data in 4TU.ResearchData.
- Via a project, departmental, or personal web site
By itself this is unlikely to comply with funder expectations regarding long term preservation of data. Ideally you should deposit copies of the data in a data repository or data archive as well.
- As supplementary materials attached to a journal
The most familiar kind of data publication is a traditional journal article accompanied by underlying data. That data can be hosted by the journal as supplementary material or deposited in a third-party repository. The trend is away from supplemental material because repositories are considered to be better suited to ensure long-term preservation and access to the data.
- As a description of your dataset in a data journal
Data papers are scholarly publications of medium length containing a non-technical description of a dataset and putting the data in a research context. Each paper gets a persistent identifier providing publication credits to the author.
- Choosing a repository
Colleagues from TU Delft’s Digital Competence Centre have developed a useful flyer to guide you through available options
Funds to support you in publishing your data
4TU.ResearchData introduced a fund to support you with publishing your research data: the FAIR Data Fund to help you to make your valuable data available.
Feel free to email library@tudelft.nl we are more than willing to help you with your data publishing questions.
On the RDM portal information on research data management is provided for every stage of your research project.