Research Data Management and Publishing

Data sharing and publishing

Data is stored in open research data repositories, where it is assigned a DOI and its metadata are registered, so that the data will be easily findable, accessible and reusable for other researchers.

If research articles are published, these will be linked to their underlying data (and other research outputs) via the DOI.

Data Availability Statement

Scientific publishers ask for Data Availability Statement (DAS) when a researcher is submitting a research article.

Some examples:

Taylor&Francis: A data availability statement (also sometimes called a ‘data access statement’) tells the reader where the data associated with a paper is available, and under what conditions the data can be accessed. They also include links (where applicable) to the data set.

Springer Nature: Data availability statements provide a statement about where data supporting the results reported in a published article can be found – including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study.

Sage Publishing: We encourage authors to include in any articles that report results derived from research data to include a Data Availability Statement (DAS). A DAS should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analyzed or generated during the study. Where research data are not publicly available, this must be stated along with any conditions for accessing the data.

In the article

Colavizza G, Hrynaszkiewicz I, Staden I, Whitaker K, McGillivray B (2020) The citation advantage of linking publications to research data. PLoS ONE 15(4): e0230416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416

The authors claim that information on data availability increases the citation of an article 25%.

Let’s have some examples:

Example 1: Open Access peer-reviewed research article + open data (supplemental material, supporting information). The code and data of abovementioned article
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416
can be found at Zenodo repository: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3470062

Example 2: Supporting information i.e. datasets, charts, figures have been given a DOI of its own. This way, each data set can be individually cited and the authors can get more citations.
Anagnostou P, Capocasa M, Milia N, Sanna E, Battaggia C, Luzi D, et al. (2015) When Data Sharing Gets Close to 100%: What Human Paleogenetics Can Teach the Open Science Movement. PLoS ONE 10(3): e0121409. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0121409

Example 3: The underlying data of articles published in subscription journals can also be open data.
The data used for an article, published in the Elsevier’s Journal of Molecular Graphics and Modelling, can be freely downloaded from the QsarDB repository.

Example 4: A project related to Estonia involves sensitive (personal) data and it cannot be openly accessible. Therefore information is published on how and under what conditions other researchers can use this data:
Goel R, Sharma R, Aasa A (2021) Understanding gender segregation through Call Data Records: An Estonian case study. PLoS ONE 16(3): e0248212. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0248212
Data Availability: The data used in this study are owned by Mobility Lab. The data can be accessed through the secured servers of the Mobility Lab after making a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with the Mobility Lab. Website: https://mobilitylab.ut.ee/. Address: Mobility Lab, University of Tartu, Faculty of Science and Technology, Institute of Ecology and Earth Sciences, Department of Geography, Vanemuise 46, 51003 Tartu, ESTONIA Email: mobilitylab@ut.ee Tel: +372 737 6844. All researchers will receive the same privileges as the authors after signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA).

Example 5: The meta-research article is accompanied by data, other materials, analysis scripts and code. Pay attention, that these needn’t be preserved in the same repository, but should be linked.
Hardwicke, T. E., Wallach, J. D., Kidwell, M. C., Bendixen, T., Crüwell, S., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2020). An empirical assessment of transparency and reproducibility-related research practices in the social sciences (2014-2017). Royal Society Open Science, 7(2), 190806. doi:https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.190806
Data accessibility: All data (https://osf.io/u9fw8/), materials (https://osf.io/z9qtr/) and analysis scripts (https://osf.io/sbrez/) related to this study are publicly available. To facilitate reproducibility this manuscript was written by interleaving regular prose and analysis code and is available in a Code Ocean container (https://doi.org/10.24433/CO.2749769.v4) which re-creates the software environment in which the original analyses were performed.

Data and metadata should be shared timely. It is generally expected that the data will be published no later than the publication, but sharing should follow established community practice and/or funder’s requirements.

The researcher has the legal right to benefit from the time and effort spent on creating the data, but not from the long-term sole use of the data.

List any expected problems with data sharing, with reasons, and how to overcome these.. Problems may arise from the confidentiality of data, circumstances related to consent or the protection of intellectual property.

If users from outside the organization are involved in any contracts, this must be indicated. Indicate the relevant conditions and responsibilities. Indicate how access to the data is controlled. If access requires a specific procedure, it must be transparent and described (see example 4).

Data Journals

However, in order to get more citations, it would be practical to promote and advertise your data even more.

One possibility way for doing this is to publish an article in a data journal. In general, a data journal does not store data. You do not present an analysis, results and conclusions in a data journal article, but you focus on a detailed description of data, on the value of data and on the possible ways of reusing data. The articles published in a data journal are peer-reviewed, and they considerably increase the number of citations.

Examples of data journals:

Each data journal instructs its authors about the preparation of a data set for publication, this aspect should be considered already when creating the data management plan.

Example:Tedersoo, L., Küngas, R., Oras, E. et al. Data sharing practices and data availability upon request differ across scientific disciplines. Sci Data 8, 192 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00981-0

Additional reading: In case someone is interested in publishing the data in a data journal, these two articles could be useful:

1. Walters, William H.. 2020. “Data Journals: Incentivizing Data Access and Documentation Within the Scholarly Communication System”. Insights 33 (1): 18. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.510

2. Sunkyung Seo, Jihyun Kim. 2020. “Data journals: types of peer review, review criteria, and editorial committee members’ positions”. Science Editing 7(2): 130-135.
https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.207

Additional reading: In 2018 UT library organised the international seminar How to Get the Maximum from Research Data – Prerequisites and Outcomes.

There are some slides from Veerle Van den Eynden’s (UK Data Archive) presentation and workshop:

Sharing and Reusing Research Data

Preparing Data for Sharing and Reuse