Research Data Management & Sharing: Storing & Sharing Data

The UR Research Repository (URRR) offers a place for faculty, researchers, students, staff, and UR community members to deposit their research outputs. URRR allows you to:

• Share your data, papers, presentations, dissertations, and other research outputs

• Make your work easily accessible to the global research community

• Meet publisher and funder requirements (such as the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy)

• Reserve a DOI for your research output

• Connect your data and research outputs to your publications and ORCID

• Benefit from the UR Libraries’ data curation process

Every UR community member will be allotted 10GB of initial storage (contact us if you need more) and data submissions will also undergo a light data curation process by the UR libraries, helping ensure your data meets funder and publisher standards.

Visit rochester.figshare.com to get started or contact our team of data librarians to get personalized guidance.  

ICPSR is the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research . It is a great place to share and find heavily-curated datasets in the social and behavioral sciences. It maintains:

• A data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences.
• Thematic data collections and data stewardship and research projects via collaborations with a number of funders, including U.S. statistical agencies and foundations.
• Educational activities, such as the Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research.

Use your UR email to get institutional access to the heavily curated datasets or to share your own. If you have trouble with using ICPSR, contact the data management and sharing service for assistance. 

• Registry of Research Data Repositories (Re3data): Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It includes repositories that enable permanent storage of and access to data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers, and scholarly institutions.
• List of NIH-Approved Repositories: List of subject-specific and generalist repositories the NIH approved as being suitable places to share data.  
• OpenDOAR: OpenDOAR is the quality-assured, global Directory of Open Access Repositories. They host repositories that provide free, open access to academic outputs and resources
• Open Access List of Data Repositories: This is a list of open data repositories, separated by subject. These subjects are: Archaeology, Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Energy, Engineering, Environmental Sciences, Geology, Geosciences and Geospatial Data, Linguistics, Marine Sciences, Medicine, Multidisciplinary Repositories, Physics, and Social Sciences. 
• FAIRsharing: A curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies. It has a searchable list of data repositories. 
• DataOne: DataONE is a community driven program providing access to data across multiple member repositories, supporting enhanced search and discovery of Earth and environmental data.

• Generalist Repository Comparison Chart: Compare Figshare, Dataverse, Dryad, Mendeley, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo. 
• OSF: OSF is a free and open source project management tool that supports researchers throughout their entire lifecycle.
• Zenodo: Zenodo is a general-purpose open repository developed under the European OpenAIRE program and operated by CERN. It allows researchers to deposit research papers, data sets, research software, reports, and any other research related digital artefacts.
• Dryad: Dryad is a nonprofit membership organization that is committed to making data available for research and educational reuse now and into the future. Modest Data Publishing Charges helps ensure their sustainability.
• Harvard Dataverse: The Harvard Dataverse Repository is a free data repository open to all researchers from any discipline, both inside and outside of the Harvard community, where you can share, archive, cite, access, and explore research data. Each individual Dataverse collection is a customizable collection of datasets (or a virtual repository) for organizing, managing, and showcasing datasets.
• OpenAIRE: OpenAIRE’s mission is to provide unlimited, barrier free, open access to research outputs financed by public funding in Europe.
• GitHub: GitHub is a development platform where you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software in collaboration with other developers. 

• ORCID is a persistent digital identifier which distinguishes you from other researchers.
• Connect all of your research outputs to your ORCID in order to increase the findability and accessibility of your research and data. 
• Use the River Campus Libraries' Guide on ORCID to ensure you have automatic updates on your scholarship activity. 

Storing data is different from sharing data. Here are some UR guidelines and advice for storing data. 

• Research Data Storage by Research Services: This guide explains the different data storage options University of Rochester faculty and staff can choose from. 
• Data Management Guide by Information Security: This guide explains how to safely and securely store data, with guidance on how to backup files, and how to securely destroy files.
• Data Security Classification Policy by University IT: The purpose of this policy is to define the classifications of data, introduce some appropriate handling measures, and present the required security controls associated with the data classification to establish consistency across the organization, including the University of Rochester, including but not limited to the University of Rochester Medical Center.

• Guidance on Creating Research Data Management Plans: Created by ORPA, this resource provides guidance on developing research data sharing plans
• Intellectual Property Policies: Various policies relating to Intellectual Property by the Office of Research and Project Administration (ORPA).
• Proposal Development Guidelines: A list of compliance links collected by ORPA, including Federal Regulations and Guidelines, Federal Public Access, NIH Specific Documents, DSF Specific Documents, Policies for Current/Pending Support, Electronic Signature Guidelines Related to NIH Requirements, Clinical Trials, FISMA, Responsible Conduct of Research, Financial Conflict of Interest, and Export Controls.
• Proposal Development Resources: Resources collected by ORPA to assist with proposal development.

It is important for researchers to consider confidentiality requirements before archiving and publishing data. The DMPTool recommends researchers consider: 

• Evaluate the anonymity of your data. Consider to what extent your data contains direct or indirect identifiers that could be combined with other public information to identify research participants.
• Obtain a confidentiality review. A benefit of depositing your data with ICPSR is that their staff offers a Disclosure review service to check your data for confidential information.
• Comply with regulations for health research set forth in the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).

To ethically share confidential data, you may be able to:

• Gain informed consent for data sharing (e.g. deposit in a repository or archive)
• Anonymize the data by removing identifying information. Be aware, however, that any dataset that contains enough information to be useful will always present some risk.
• Restrict the use of your data. ICPSR provides a sample Restricted Data Use Contract and Restricted-Use Data Management Guidance.

It may be necessary to de-identify your data. This article by Kelsey Finch at the Future of Privacy Forum is a good resource on de-identifying your data. 

The Open Data Commons, the home of a set of legal tools and licenses to help researchers publish, provide and use open data, has created three standards licenses: 

• Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL)
• Open Data Commons Attribution License (ODC-By) 
• Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and License (PDDL)

The Open Data Commons also has a Licenses Service, which has data on more than 100 open source, open data and open content licenses in JSON and API friendly form.

The Creative Commons also has a library of standardized licenses, with some of them pertaining to research data management and sharing. The two related most to research data management and sharing are the following: 

• CC0 (CC Zero) 
• Public Domain Mark (PDM)

If you are not interested in CC0, you can learn more about other CC licenses by going to Data and CC Licenses.