Open Research

Making data open via Melbourne Figshare

The University has a data repository where you can publish your data: Melbourne Figshare is an institutional data repository which enables staff and graduate research students  at the University to store, manage, publish and share digital materials.  The repository is a platform that enables data, other supplementary research materials and non-traditional outputs (NTROs) to be easily cited and discovered.  Materials uploaded to Melbourne Figshare are kept locally on University managed storage infrastructure.  You can access Melbourne Figshare using your University credentials. 

Materials published in Melbourne Figshare can be shared at the appropriate level of openness:

• Public - for materials that can be shared openly. Digital files are shareable, downloadable and reusable.
• Temporarily embargoed - for materials that will be shared openly in the future, but cannot be shared openly at the present time.
• Permanently embargoed - for materials that cannot be shared publicly online.  Information about the assets can be, to either facilitate meditated access, or so the output can be cited.
• Private link - for materials that are either under a permanent or temporary embargo, or are unpublished but need to be shared privately with a supervisor, peer reviewer or collaborator.

You can visit the Melbourne Figshare website or contact the Digital Stewardship (Research) team for support with publishing your data and using Melbourne Figshare. 

Making data open via a discipline repository

It may be most strategic for you to publish your data in an external 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

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.

Melbourne Figshare citation example: 

Hipsley, Christy; D. O'Hara, Timothy (2018). CT data and colour-rendered 3D images for Patiriella littoralis holotype (TMAG H468) and Patiriella regularis (MV F87407). University of Melbourne. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.26188/5b7a226c4f1b2