Library Guides: Open Research: How to make your data open

Contact a Librarian

For enquiries relating to open research, please email your discipline's liaison librarians or arrange a time to consult a librarian.

Alternatively, you can contact the library by emailing library-enquiries@unimelb.edu.au.

Making data open via melbourne.figshare.com

The University has a data repository where you can publish your data: melbourne.figshare.com. You can access melbourne.figshare.com using your University credentials.

Data published in melbourne.figshare.com can be shared at the appropriate level of openness:

Public - for data that can be shared openly.
Temporarily embargoed - for data that will be shared openly in the future, but cannot be shared openly at the present time.
Permanently embargoed - for data that cannot itself be shared publicly online, but information about the data can be, either to facilitate meditated access to the dataset, or so the data can be cited.
Private link - for data that are currently under a permanent or temporary embargo, but need to be shared privately with a peer reviewer or collaborator.

You can contact the Digital Stewardship (Research) team for support with publishing your data with melbourne.figshare.com.

Open up your research: data
Learn more about open data on the Open Scholarship website

Making data open via a discipline repository

It may be most strategic for you to publish your data in a discipline-specific data repository, where it will be found by other researchers in your field. You may already be aware of prominent data repositories in your area of study. Your colleagues or your supervisor might also be able to point you towards suitable repositories. Another method of finding suitable discipline-specific repositories is by consulting a registry of data repositories such as re3data.org or the FAIRsharing catalogue of databases.

Making data open via a general repository

There are also several general repositories where you can create an account for free and deposit research data from any discipline. These include

Zenodo
Zenodo - developed by CERN to support the open access and open science movement in Europe, but available for use by researchers worldwide
OSF
OSF - developed by the Center for Open Science in the US to support open science and reproducibility, but available for use by researchers worldwide
figshare.com
figshare.com - the general version of the University's institutional data repository, anyone can sign up for an account

Promoting open data via a journal

You may also want to promote your data by publishing a data paper in a data journal. Data papers provide an opportunity for you to describe your dataset in detail and have your work peer-reviewed. Here are some methods of finding data journals:

Edinburgh University maintain a wiki page listing data journals
This 2014 blog post by Katherine Akers lists data journals
A list of data journals is also publicly available as supplementary material to the following paper:
Candela, L., Castelli, D., Manghi, P., & Tani, A. (2015). Data journals: A survey. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(9), 1747–1762. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23358

Data citation

Data can be cited, just like any other research output. The citation format recommended by DataCite is:

Creator (PublicationYear). Title. Version. Publisher. ResourceType. Identifier

Version and ResourceType are optional properties. The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) provide an example of a data citation using this format.

The Identifier property is most commonly a Digital Object Identifier (DOI). You will receive a DOI for your data, so that it can be cited, when you deposit it with most data repositories, including melbourne.figshare.com.