Research data publishing and discovery

Publishing research data and other outputs increases the visibility and reuse of your work. Funders and journal publishers are increasingly requiring the publication of data alongside the peer-reviewed article to support greater transparency and allow validation of findings. Publishing data also supports the internationally recognised FAIR principles for research data.

You may also be expected to publish your research data as per the University's Research Data Management Policy.

Publishing research data directly benefits researchers by:

• Increasing citations for your research outputs
• Directing readers to associated publications and materials
• Facilitating research collaborations

Before publishing your data, consider:

• Describing research data with a README (a summary of human-readable metadata or information about your data), which helps others to understand your research and make use of the data.
• Naming and organising files in a clear, concise, and consistent way to make it easier for others to understand the data.
• Saving a version of the data files in open, universal formats (e.g. saving a spreadsheet as a .csv file rather than an Excel spreadsheet, .xlsx).
• When working with data in spreadsheets (tabular data), use the following tidy data principles to make it easier for other people to ingest, manipulate, and visualise the data:
  • Ensure each column contains one variable, each row contains one observation, and each cell contains one value.
  • Move separate data tables and sheets into their own spreadsheet files.
  • Remove highlighting, borders, notes, and other formatting.

These strategies support others to find, understand, and work with your published data.

• The University-hosted Institutional Figshare is suitable in most cases.
• A disciplinary or community-recognised repository may be appropriate, such as the CERN Open Data Portal.
• You may prefer a general data repository such as Zenodo.

To find a suitable repository, search re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories).

Licensing a work makes the terms of reuse clear to potential users. Data publishing repositories such as the University of Auckland's Institutional Figshare repository or Zenodo offer several licences to choose from.

These usually include licences from the Creative Commons family of licences. The Creative Commons licence chooser provides a step-by-step process to select a licence based on conditions you choose.

If you're unsure which licence to select, contact Copyright advisory services.

Researchers may have legal, funder, or institutional requirements which make it necessary to broadcast the existence of a dataset without actually sharing it. For example, if you’re working with sensitive data, it may be more appropriate to publish a descriptive record about the data instead of the data itself. 

See Data sharing for reuse for more information.

Research Data Support Services
Email: researchdata@auckland.ac.nz

eResearch Engagement Lead
Email: Laura Armstrong