Managing, storing and sharing your research data is a crucial part of your research. More and more, there is an expectation from funders, institutions and the research community that the data supporting research publications will be shared. It is important to embed good practice early in the research project and to spend time thinking about how this data will be managed.

More and more, researchers will have to complete a Data Management Plan. This applies to researchers in all disciplines. It is important to understand the data you are using for your research, whether qualitative, quantitative or both, and whether primary data that you collected. or secondary data (data that is available to be used).

Managing and sharing data is often linked to the research ethics process, so it is key to understand the process at the University of Sunderland. There is guidance on this process.

Sharing your data is one aspect of Open Research. To understand the basics of sharing your data, you can watch the following video.

Data comes in different shapes and sizes, from interview transcripts to statistics, from historical records to personal information. Setting out clearly what you will do with your data and how you will store it is an important step in the research process.

If you work with a team, it is crucial to know who is responsible for adding the data to the data set, have a clear set of instructions on how this data needs to be stored and where. Creating metadata for your data is part of the challenge. The metadata will allow other users to re-use the data either to reproduce your study or to develop a new study.

To help you think about how to deal with your data, you can use DMP online. This allows you to create a data management plan.

Sharing research data should be underpinned by the FAIR principles:

• Findable
• Accessible
• Interoperable
• Reusable

Information about the FAIR Principles can be found on the GoFair website.

Iamge Credit: Sonja Bezjak, April Clyburne-Sherin, Philipp Conzett, Pedro Fernandes, Edit Görögh, Kerstin Helbig, Bianca Kramer, Ignasi Labastida, Kyle Niemeyer, Fotis Psomopoulos, Tony Ross-Hellauer, René Schneider, Jon Tennant, Ellen Verbakel, Helene Brinken, & Lambert Heller. (2018). Open Science Training Handbook (1.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212496 Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication

Before sharing your data, you will have to consider:

• What are my funders' or institutional requirements?
• Do I have the legal and intellectual property rights to keep and re-use this data? If not, can I get them, or can they be negotiated?
• Should the data be deleted after a certain length of time?
• What can be shared: Are there any legal or ethical restrictions on sharing all or part of the data?
• What should be shared? Is all the data that was generated by the project useful to keep?
• Do I have sufficient documentation and descriptive information (metadata) to explain the data, allow it to be found wherever it is stored?
• If I need to pay to keep the data, can I afford it?

The University currently does not have a data repository. SURE can be used to store some data using the date type. However, only files of up to 2GB can be uploaded. If you work with a funder, make sure you check their requirement around data sharing. They might require depositing data in a specific data repository.

There is a range of data repositories that you can explore. Some of the common cross-disciplinary repositories are:

• Figshare: You can upload up to 20GB (Individual researchers can use Figshare+ to store a large amount of data linked to a research publication or project. This has a fee attached.)
• Zenodo
• Open Science Framework

There are also a number of discipline-specific data repositories. PLOS One created a list of some of these that you can view on their website.

If you share your data, it will become a publication in its own right. In the same way as with your publications, you should think about how to license the data that can be shared and consider what reuse you want to allow.

Open Research principles also push towards applying CC-BY licences to ensure maximum impact of the data that is shared. However, you might want to check whether there are any requirements around this research data from funders, third parties involved in the research, from your institution or linked to the type of data you are sharing.

You can use the guide below, created by Barbara Long-Flint under a CC-BY licence, to explore some of these issues.