Finding the right data repository

It is worth thinking about where you are going to store your data when you prepare a data management plan. This will help inform you of the standards, required formats and metadata that will be required at the end of the project when the data is deposited. This is especially useful in a larger and collaborative project.

There may already be an established repository in your discipline or one that your funder recommends and supports; such as UK Data Archive or British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC).

Recently, some journal publishers have started to specify repositories in which code and supplementary materials may be deposited. However, care should be taken to check the conditions under which this happens. Some publishers do not publish supplementary material under a Creative Commons licence but rather claim the copyright for themselves.

Check your specific funder requirements or Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) for repositories in your subject area.

If there is no suitable subject repository there are a number of good multi-disciplinary repositories:

  • Zenodo An open access data, software and publication repository for researchers who want to share multidisciplinary research results not available in other repositories. Developed and hosted by CERN. Suitable for all types of research data. Free to use with guaranteed funding from the EU for the foreseeable future.
  • FigShare Researchers can post all their data. The aim is to reduce the replication of research data unnecessarily. Free to use and owned by Macmillan Group.
  • Dryad 'An international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences'. Supported by a consortium of journals and publishers such as Oxford University Press, Ecology Letters and BioMed Central. There is a small charge per deposit.
  • NERC Data Centres Several data centres run by the Natural Environment Research Council for environment-related data.
  • UK Data Service Funded by the Economic and Social Research Council
  • CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network): the Data Hub . This is an Open Knowledge Foundation project, containing dataset collections spanning a wide range of scientific disciplines from medicine to earth sciences
  • The Council of European Social Science Data Archives 

Liverpool Research Data Catalogue

The University of Liverpool has its own research data repository, the Research Data Catalogue. You can use this repository to create a record of your finalised research data and refer to at a later date.

The Catalogue holds two types of record:-

  • A discovery-only record – where your research data is held elsewhere, this type of record describes the data and records the DOI for discovery in a different repository.
  • A discover and data record – where you create a record to aid discovery and deposit the data as well into the catalogue. This process will create a unique DOI. This can be used in data citations and data statements.

Deposit your finalised research data into the Data Catalogue when there is no appropriate funder or discipline-specific data service for your data. The Data Catalogue is intended to complement, not compete with, other established data services.

It is always a good idea to link your datasets to any outputs based on the data. In the metadata about your datasets you can add the titles of any related articles. Make those articles openly accessible by depositing your author accepted manuscript into the Repository via Liverpool Elements.

Datasets that you upload to the Data Catalogue do not go live straight away. They are checked by the RDM team to ensure they have adequate supporting documentation (such as comprehensive readme files), and that the data uploaded matches the record created.