Sharing - Liverpool Data Catalogue and Others

The best place to share the data you have prepared is either a national data centre or subject specific repository. Check your funder requirements to see if they have a preferred option. The University of Liverpool also offers its own repository, the Liverpool Data Catalogue. There are also a number of good multi-disciplinary repositories available, such as Zenodo, FigShare, and Dryad.

To find research data repositories in your discipline go to re3data.

Liverpool Data Catalogue

The Data Catalogue allows University of Liverpool researchers to create a record of their finalised research data in a secure online environment.

The Catalogue holds three types of record:

  • A metadata record – your research data is held elsewhere, but the description, keywords and DOI are included in this record.
  • A data record – a record is created and dataset(s) uploaded. Each record has a unique DOI, to be used in citations and data statements.
  • A controlled access data record –a data record above, but data can only be shared under certain circumstances. Contact the RDM team to discuss this option before creating a catalogue entry.

Link your datasets to any outputs based on the data, either in the field provided or in additional information.

Datasets uploaded to the Data Catalogue do not go live straight away. The RDM team check each submission first.

 

Barriers to sharing

There are circumstances where sharing might not be possible:

  • Where rights of individual researchers or subjects would be compromised
  • Where consent has not been given
  • Where there is an Intellectual Property or Patent opportunity
  • Where secondary data has been used and rights to share with others were not obtained
  • Where data has been purchased from a commercial provider or the project itself is a collaboration with a commercial concern and there are restrictions.

For advice on IP when considering funding applications, see the IP page.

To discuss an Intellectual Property Opportunity - email the Intellectual Property Service.

Options to overcome barriers to sharing;

Embargoes

Upload your data to the Liverpool Data Catalogue and place it under an embargo (whilst awaiting publication of an article or while investigating IP situation). You must check with your funder as most limit the amount of time data can be embargoed.

Anonymisation

Projects collecting personal and sensitive data should ensure all data is comprehensively anonymised before sharing can be considered. You should seek consent from each participant to share anonymised data. This is usually done via consent forms and information sheets.

Due to the nature of some research anonymisation can be difficult. The UK Data Archive has guidance about anonymising qualitative or quantitative data in a research setting. More detailed advice, including examples of anonymisation methods, can be found in the Code of Practice on the Information Commissioner’s Office website.

University of Liverpool researchers are required to make an ethics application to obtain approval before the start of such projects. Guidance on how to obtain consent is available from the Research Support Office.

Go back and get consent

Where consent was not obtained to share anonymised data, it might be possible to go back and ask for consent. However much depends on whether or not a project has finished, in reality this is usually not feasible.

Controlled access

It might be more appropriate to obtain consent for limited sharing between professionals. Access would be restricted to specific researchers who, once their access has been authorised, would be required to sign a formal data sharing agreement.

Further information

Need to manage your sensitive data? Use this useful decision tree from the Australian National Data Service.

Discovery – be findable

Whether or not your data can be made open, details of the data you have collected, created, and analysed should be made discoverable, by both humans and machines.

Your research data and/or essential information about the data, such as list of authors, keywords, and a readme file, should be attached to a record that has a unique persistent identifier, such as a DOI. Not only will a DOI make your data discoverable, but it also means it can be easily cited.

You should provide a data statement  within any publication resulting from your data, linking to the record or metadata record in the Liverpool Data Catalogue, or whichever research data repository you are using.

Publish under a licence

Your research data should be reused as you and your funder wish. Your data should be available under a recognised and appropriate licence. The default licence for the Liverpool Research Data Catalogue is CC-BY, but other Creative Commons licences are available.

Wherever you share your data, you should make sure that it is made available under a recognised licence. In most cases this is either creative commons, open government licence or GNU public licence commonly used for software.

Publishers and your Research Data

Many publishers now have research data policies. They offer a route to publishing data either as supplementary information or through their data repositories.

You should always check the conditions under which the data is published. It should be open and most funders require a CC-BY licence. Supplementary information might not necessarily be open, even if your journal article is.

Some journals now embed the dataset into the journal article itself (using their own research data repository). In such instances the article and the data might share the same DOI. In order to increase citations and the opportunity for your data to be reused separately from the article, it may well be more appropriate to have a separate DOI for your data. You should check that you can deposit your data into another standalone data catalogue, such as the Liverpool Research Data Catalogue.

Next Steps

Login to the University of Liverpool Data Catalogue

Contact the RDM Team