Data Sharing Compliance Made Easy
Easily Comply with Data Sharing Policies
In the spirit of Love Data Week, an annual event that aims to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, and preservation, let's delve into the critical role of research data archiving. With increasing emphasis from research funders on data sharing policies, using repositories to ensure this data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reproducible (FAIR) is critical. OSF offers workflows to make your data sharing easy, quick, and compliant.
The Necessity of Data Archiving in the Context of Funder Policies
Most research funders now have stringent policies for data sharing and management. These policies often require researchers to:
Plan for Data Management: Create detailed data management plans outlining how data will be handled both during and after the research project.
Ensure Data Accessibility: Make data accessible for a certain period post-publication, often requiring it to be stored in a publicly accessible repository.
- Promote Data Reuse: Encourage the reuse of data by other researchers, which necessitates proper documentation and archiving.
Archiving and Sharing Data on OSF
The OSF provides tools that align well with these funder requirements. In particular, OSF Registries has guided workflows to help you document your research plan or archive and share research results.
Documentation and Compliance: OSF registrations allow for detailed documentation of research plans and datasets, meeting the transparency requirements of most funders.
Enhanced Accessibility: By enabling researchers to make their data publicly accessible, OSF helps fulfill the accessibility requirements of many funding bodies.
- Long-Term Preservation: OSF’s archiving capabilities ensure that data remains accessible and reusable long after the project's completion.
The OSF Registries interface and workflow are designed to make it easy to submit, preserve, and share your research outputs as well as connect them with related resources. This process will enable you to meet the high standards of the OSTP desirable characteristics of repositories without significant data administration effort. These are a few tips to make your data more accessible and discoverable than ever.
Add your funder information to your registered data
Funders will often require researchers to acknowledge their support on papers, datasets, and other materials. You can quickly find and add your project funders to your data on the metadata page. Your data is now discoverable using the funder filter through OSF Search, as well as through many indexes and reports that ingest funder identifiers.
Label your archived data as a dataset
You can also designate a “Resource Type” on the metadata page. This helps indexers know how to classify your content for easier discovery, including Google Dataset Search.
Share and cite your dataset DOI
A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is an ideal way to share and cite your data. It is persistent, so no changes to the OSF site will break the link and no other webpage will ever have the same identifier. It is also ideal for enabling relationships between your data and other resources.
Connect your papers and other materials to your data
Data is one part of the research lifecycle of your study. Open practice resources allow you to create a relationship between each of the outputs of your study including papers, analytic code, material, and supplements. These are now discoverable alongside your data.
Want to Know More?
For more information and other OSF tips and tricks please see our support guides, or contact OSF Support for more information.
