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Sharing data and data repositories

Why share your data?

Data sharing achieves many important goals for the research community, such as:

  • Reinforcing open scientific inquiry;
  • Encouraging diversity of analysis and opinion;
  • Promoting new research, testing of new or alternative hypotheses and methods of analysis;
  • Supporting studies on data collection methods and measurement;
  • Facilitating education of new researchers;
  • Enabling the exploration of topics not envisioned by the initial investigators;
  • Permitting the creation of new datasets by combining data from multiple sources.

How do you go about sharing data?

Some of the options to consider:

Open access 

Storing your data securely in a repository or data store and providing open access via a link. This option is suitable for the broadest possible access to your data, when there are no legal, ethical or commercial barriers to your doing so.

Mediated access

This would involve having other researchers contact you (or someone else that you authorise) directly to arrange access to the data. This option is suitable if you are concerned about the way that your data might be used or if you would like to provide further context for interpretation of the data. It can also be used in cases where re-use is allowed but requires approval from a project steering group or human ethics committee.

Restricted access

Storing your data securely in a repository or data store and providing controlled access e.g. through use of a password. You might want to consider this option if you can only make your data available to a certain set of people (e.g. those that worked on the project) or there are privacy considerations. Keep in mind that sensitive and confidential data can often be shared ethically if informed consent for data sharing has been given and identities have been anonymised.

Contact researchdata@bond.edu.au if you have data to share or have any queries on data management.

Journals with associated datasets

PLoS released a data policy on March 1, 2014, in which authors are required to include a data availability statement in all research articles published by PLOS journals. 

The following journals also publish articles with associated datasets:

Information about licensing data is available in this guide.

Data collections in Bond University's Research Portal (Pure)

The Bond University Research Portal describes and holds some interesting Datasets.
 
Bond University is committed to the principle of 'Open Access' sharing the results of publicly funded scholarship with the wider community. One way for research staff to share their research outputs is through Pure which displays in the Research Portal. Most types of outputs can be deposited into Pure including research data.
 
Explore Bond University's Data Collections.
 
For Data Collections enquiries contact  Antoinette Cass.

Research Data Australia

Depositing your data in an archive or repository will facilitate its discovery and preservation.

Bond University has data collections described on Research Data Australia. Contact the Manager, Scholarly Publications if you would like to make your data more discoverable, accessible and represented in this national database.

List of data repositories

There are a number of discipline-specific data repositories as well as institutional repositories and archives where you can deposit data. Some of these are:

For more repositories see:

Research Data Australia and ORCID

Watch this short video on how to import your datasets from Research Data Australia into your ORCID profile.

Open access

Open Access (OA) is free, immediate and permanent online access to the scholarly publication.

OA integrate the same features as traditional scholarly publishing. The main difference is that anyone can read, download, copy, print or link to the publication - free of charge.

There are two primary approaches to Open Access publishing, known as ‘Gold' and 'Green' model. There is also a Hybrid model in which not all content is openly accessible. Policies vary.

Green Self Archiving

Articles are published in subscription-based journals.  Authors may self-archive a version of their article for free public use, either in their own or their institutional repository (e.g. Bond University Research Portal) or an open access website.

Gold Open Access

The publisher makes content openly available to all, immediately upon publication without the need for any subscription or purchase. This model usually requires an Article Processing Charge paid by the author or their institution.

Authors are encouraged to check Open Policy Finder (formerly Sherpa Services) for publisher policies. Information about the journals is also available from the Ulrich's periodical directory. Enter the title of the journal you are interested in then limit to 'open access' journals.

Watch “Open access explained!” - by PhD Comics (2012) video to gain a better understanding of open access publishing.

Research data management toolkit