Addressing what data you plan to share, which repository you plan to use, and when you plan to share them are common components of data management plans.
Most funding agencies and journals encourage or require researchers to share their data through appropriate repositories.
We can help!
Contact the Research Data Services Librarian for support with sharing your data.
The University New Hampshire (UNH) Institutional Review Board (IRB) for the Protection of Human Subjects in Research developed Guidelines for Sharing Human Subjects Research Data to assist researchers who plan to share with other researchers or external entities individual level research data derived from human subjects. Also, visit the Qualitative Data Repository for general guidance.
Depositing your data in an repository will facilitate its discovery, access, and long-term preservation. Informal methods of providing your data, such as emailing it to a colleague or posting a file on a website, are not the same as sharing your data in a way that makes it easy for other researchers to find and cite your data.
Repositories are maintained by many academic discipline communities, by funding agencies to provide access to funded research, and by academic institutions to protect community member research. To find content and discipline-specific data repositories, for your data or looking for archived data to reuse, start with the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) and the Data Repository listing on the Open Access Directory Wiki. But word of mouth is also good – where are people in your field submitting their data or where are they looking for data to reuse. Discipline-specific repositories often have more support on the back end (in terms of review or curation services) and some charge for submission (or access)
Data Repository Listing
There are also some very good generalist repositories that are free to submit and free to access. These are great options if your field doesn’t have a go-to repository or you don’t have money to pay for submission fees at fee-based repositories. The three below well-known and provide DOIs for your submission.
ICPSR is for social and political sciences. As members, UNH researchers can submit and access data free of charge. They provide nice curation services. But any researchers who are not from member institutions must pay a fee to access the data (unless the researcher has paid a curation fee upfront to offset that).
There are also some repositories for specific grant-funded projects - if you have a funder, we can check on that too. Also, check the author guidelines for the publication - some may have suggestions on where to deposit (although I am seeing this less, lately).
