Store and Publish Data

Due to the Open Science Movement the publishing of one's own research data has increasingly become part of the research process itself. Research funders, such as the SNSF, but also publishers now require their grantees and authors to publish their data together with the publication. By publishing one's data, researchers make their work more transparent and increase its visibility.

To make your data FAIR and to ensure that others can access and use your data, the data should be:

• described systematically (consistently) and in detail
• documented with metadata
• findable (e.g. by uploading it on a well-known repository)
• citable (e.g. by assigning a persistent identifier such as a DOI)
• published in an open format
• licensed as openly as possible while taking data protection issues into account.

In order for others to be able to reuse your research data, you upload it to a repository, that is, a digital archive. There are three types of repositories:

• discipline-specific repositories
• institutional repositories
• generic repositories

You are on the safe side if your repository:

• supports the upload of your data type
• is easily findable
• meets the requirements of your funder (e.g. follows the FAIR principles) 
• assigns persistent identifiers (PIDs) such as DOIs to the uploaded files

In order to meet the Requirements of the SNSF, have a look at the list of criteria for repositories (PDF, 113 KB) or go directly to the list of SNSF recommended repositories.

The easiest way to publish your data is by sharing it via a discipline-specific repository:

• Ask around in your community to find out which repositories are frequently used.
• re3data.org is another good starting point for your research. re3data.org is currently the most important and largest registry of research data repositories world-wide.

Use the following filters on re3data.org:

• AID (author identifier) = authors are uniquely identifiable
• Data Licenses = data are licensed for reuse
• Data Access = data are openly accessible
• Metadata Standards = established metadata standards are used
• PID (persistent identifier) = the repository assigns persistent identifiers to its objects, e.g. DOIs

If you work with personal / sensitive data, you will need to consider issues of data protection before sharing or publishing your data. Contact your institute's IT coordinator to safely store sensitive data during your project. The Swiss Competence Center for Social Sciences FORS offers webinars and documents on data anonymization, informed consent, and on working with sensitive or personal data.

For any other questions related to working with sensitive data, contact us at data@ub.uzh.ch.

The Central IT offers the possibility to archive your data for the longer-term. Contact your institute's IT coordinator to ask for details.