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Data Sharing Resources
Following the completion of a research project, researchers are encouraged, and often required, to share research data alongside their published works. Data sharing can benefit the entire scientific community, as it incentivizes reproducibility and replication while also providing long-term accessibility and discovery of your research. What data you share will vary based on the project and research area, but good data management practices and infrastructure can help the process.
Benefits of Data Sharing
- Compliance with research funding organizations that require data management plans and data accessibility
- Compliance with journals that require submission of research data alongside publications
- Recognition for your contribution to the creation of research data, with academic citations
- Encourages additional research opportunities, as others can replicate or reuse the data for new analyses
Data Sharing Recommendations
- Deposit research data and code in open access data repositories
- Use persistent links between publications and data repositories
- Thoroughly document contextual information related to data, code, workflows and the computational environment and include the information with your dataset submission
- Encourage reproducibility of your research results by publishing in an open access journal
Policies
- NIH Data Sharing Policy and Public Access Policy
- NSF Data Sharing Policy
- Harvard’s Intellectual Property Statement
- Harvard FAS Open Access Policy
Journals
Many journals now require that published articles include the associated research data as part of the submission. To determine whether your journal requires your data be shared, review the journal’s data sharing policy.
Intellectual Property
Review any intellectual property and copyright restrictions. In general, raw data cannot be copyrighted, but some expressions of data like databases can be copyrighted or licensed.
- Promote data sharing and reuse by assigning an appropriate license
- If you assign a license that restricts the sharing of data, provide detailed information about how to generate and analyze the data, so others can reproduce your results.
- If you have questions about how to protect your work as an inventor, consider filing a Report of Innovation(ROI) with Harvard OTD.
Data Use Agreements
Data Use Agreements (DUAs) are binding contracts between organizations that govern how research data will be transferred and utilized. The terms and conditions vary depending on the laws and regulations around the data type (i.e. personally identifiable information), as well as the policies or requirements of the Provider. The Office for Sponsored Programs (OSP) and Office of Research Administration (ORA) are the authorized signatories for Harvard and can help facilitate the DUA process for Harvard researchers. If you have any questions, please contact the Harvard DUA team.
Data Repositories
Data repositories offer the necessary infrastructure to host research data as required by institutions, funders, and journals. They can assist with the maintenance, organization, access, and curation of your research data. They also provide a persistent identifier and citation for your data, generally in the form of a DOI.
- Harvard Dataverse
- All file formats accepted
- Files cannot exceed 2.5GB, but larger files can be uploaded by Harvard Dataverse upon request.
- Dataset size set to 1TB per researcher, but larger datasets can be uploaded by Harvard Dataverse upon request.
- Strongly encourages use of the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license for all public datasets
- Assigns a DOI for each dataset
- Tiered level access (administrator, collaborator, curator)
- Comprehensive data and metadata search capabilities
- Data downloading via API
- Free for all researchers worldwide (up to 1TB), with no maintenance fees