Publishing your data

Why publish research data?

Prompt availability of materials, data, code, and associated protocols is a condition of publication in various journals or securing funding.

Researchers can meet this condition by submitting their data to the repository that assigns persistent identifiers (DOIs and accession numbers) to the data. Such data is properly citable and can be referenced.

How to choose a repository? 

One should first identify whether a commonly-used discipline-specific, community-recognized repository exists (please refer to FAIRsharing.org or re3data.org). If yes, on should submit the data there. For example, sequencing data could be stored into SRA, ArrayExpress, GEO, GeneBank, etc. Mass spectrometry based proteomics data could be submitted to ProteomeXchange or the PRIDE Archive.

If a discipline-specific, community-recognized repository does not exist, one should deposit data into a generalist repository. There are multiple options with different pros and cons (link). The most common generalist repositories are: Zenodo, Figshare, BioStudies, Dryad, Open Science Framework.

Funders and publishers usually list eligible repositories on their web-sites or in our brief summary:

Additional literature:

Desirable Characteristics of Data Repositories