Publishing research data¶

Research data publication allows your data to be reused by other researchers e.g. to validate your research or to carry out follow-on research. To that end, a suitable data publication host will allow your data to be discovered (e.g. by publishing metadata) and will be publicly accessible (i.e. on the internet).

Research data can be published on the internet through:

• project web sites
• research group web-sites
• generic web archives (e.g. archive.org)
• research data sites (e.g. figshare)
• more general open access research hosts (e.g. f1000 Research)
• thematic repositories dedicated to a specific discipline / subject area - sadly there is no sign of an appropriate repository for digital music and audio research
• institutional repositories dedicated to research from a specific organisation (e.g. QMUL have a repository through which Green open access copies of papers by QM research staff can be published).
• supplementary materials attached to journal articles

Within the Centre for Digital Music, we now have a research data repository for publishing research data outputs from the group.

If the publication web-site is also to be the long-term archive for you data, you should check that the meets the criteria for an archival storage system. However, although data will be written to the host irregularly, it is expected that the data will be accessed more frequently than archived data. Offline storage is therefore not suitable.

Persistent IDs for data¶

In order to ensure ongoing access to your data, should look to acquire a persistent ID for your dataset. However, persistence is a continuum with some IDs more persistent than others. DOIs and handles are designed to be persistent in the long term, allowing a unique identifier to be redirected to the current location of your dataset - if the dataset moves, the DOI/handle can be pointed at the new location. Repositories and research data sites may provide DOIs for data submitted to them. Institutional URLs may be persistent if the institution makes a policy decision to make them so. Other URLs may change when web-sites are revamped making the published URL for your data return a "404 Not Found" message.

Persistent IDs are useful for referencing datasets, and are particularly handy if they are short - long / ugly DOIs can be shortened using the ShortDOI service.

Misc. Other Repositories¶

The Digital Curation Centre have a (very short) list of repositories .

Repositories using DSpace can be registered on the DSpace web-site, for inclusion in the list of Who's using DSpace ? .

Within the University of London, the School of Advanced Study has a repository of humanities-related items.

University of the Arts London have an online repository

Edina provides a national data centre

EDINA is a UK national academic data centre, designated by JISC on behalf of UK funding bodies to support the activity of universities, colleges and research institutes in the UK, by delivering access to a range of online data services through a UK academic infrastructure, as well as supporting knowledge exchange and ICT capacity building, nationally and internationally.

Services hosted at EDINA include:

• JISC Mediahub
• OpenDepot open access to journal papers
• Mapping data

Pre-press e-Prints of articles can be published through http://arxiv.org/ and the related Computing Research Repository

And more repositories