Data life cycle: Sharing

Sharing data means making your data known to other people.

It’s important to know that data sharing doesn’t mean open data or public data. You can choose to share your data with restricted access or even closed access. Data sharing can be done at any time during the research data life cycle but, at the latest, data should be made available at the time of publication of articles that use the data to make scientific conclusions.

For open access article publishing, EUR has done a lot of deals with the most common publishers, so please check if your journal is already part of these deals, you can look for your journal in the EUR Journal Browser.

For open data and materials, at EUR we have an institutional repository on which you can upload your data and materials for free. The EUR data repository (EDR) is recommened if you don’t already have a prefered or dicipline dependent repository.

Once you have uploaded your data and materials to the EDR, you can then register them into your PURE page, so that they appear as your reseach output.

If you need financial support to make your data or materials FAIR and open, please revise the ERIM Support Programs (ESP).

Sharing of data is a cornerstone of good science. It is a good research practice to ensure that data underlying research is preserved and made available to the research community and society at large. Sharing data is a prerequisite for making your research reproducible. To be useful for others, you should strive to make the shared data adhere to the FAIR principles.

In the European Union, the ‘Open Data Directive’ (Directive (EU) 2019/1024) states that “Member States shall support the availability of research data by adopting national policies and relevant actions aiming at making publicly funded research data openly available (‘open access policies’), following the principle of ‘open by default’ and compatible with the FAIR principles.”

Making the data as FAIR as possible will ensure that maximum value can be obtained out of it in future. To learn how FAIR your data is, you can use the EUR FAIR Aware tool.

If you want to share or publish your data, you should:

make sure you have the rights to do so (i.e., are you the creator of the data?);
consider all possible ethical, legal, contractual, or intellectual property restrictions related to your data (GDPR, consent, patent, etc);
check funders and institutional requirements about data sharing policy and data availability;
establish if you need to limit reusability of your data for legitimate reasons (consider applying a specific licence);
make the data citable so that you can receive credit (use identifiers).

Based on the considerations listed above, you should be able to determine the right type of access for you data. Even if the access to the data is restricted, it is good practice to openly and publicly share the metadata of your data.

Open access: data is shared publicly. Anyone can access the data freely.
Registered access or authentication procedure: potential users must register before they are able to access the data. The “researcher” status is guaranteed by the institution and the user agrees to abide by data usage policies of repositories that serve the shared data. Datasets shared via registered-access would typically have no restrictions besides the condition that data is to be used for research. Registered access allows the data archive to monitor who can access data, enabling reminders about conditions of use to be issued.
Controlled access or Data Access Committees (DACs): data can only be shared with researchers, whose research is reviewed and approved by a Data Access Committee (DAC). DAC is an organization of one or more named individuals responsible for data release to external requestors based on specific criteria (research topics, allowed geographical regions, allowed recipients etc). Criteria established by DAC for data access are usually described on the website of the organization.
Access upon request (not recommended): in order to manage this type of access a named contact is required for the dataset who would be responsible for making decisions about whether access is granted. The owner of the data must provide his/her contact in the documentation associated with the datasets (metadata). Metadata about the datasets must be open.

Contributors

Data life cycle: Sharing

What is data sharing?

What options do I have for sharing my data and materials as an ERIM member?

Why is data sharing important?

What should be considered for data sharing?