Open Access and Scholarly Communication

CSU has a membership with the generalist data repository Dryad. See our webpage about Dryad to find out if Dryad is the right place to deposit your data.

Publishing and sharing research data is a great way of incorporating open access and FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability) principles into your research practices. By sharing your data, other researchers can validate and build upon your research, creating a collaborative culture that is more inclusive, reproducible, and improves public trust in science. Data sharing is also required by many journals as part of the article publishing process.

In addition, many funding agencies and institutions, such as the NIH, have also encouraged or updated their policies to require some level of open data sharing. SPARC has a tool to browse data and article sharing policies by funding agencies, so researchers can gain a better understanding of specific data sharing requirements they may have to navigate.

Effective data sharing requires good planning and data management practices throughout the research data lifecycle. For more information about creating a data management plan (DMP), see CSU Libraries' webpage about DMPs.

There are three major types of data repositories where you can deposit your data for sharing. Many disciplines have preferred discipline-specific repositories. If your discipline does not have a preferred repository, there are also general repositories that take data from all fields. The third option is to deposit your data into an institutional repository. At CSU, we offer self-archiving for journal articles in Mountain Scholar, and research data can be shared through our institutional membership with Dryad.

Below you will find links to resources to help you find the right repository for your data.

Data Repositories by Category

Discipline-specific Repositories

• Registry of Research Data Repositories by Subject
  A search tool for identifying repositories by subject.
• FAIRsharing.org Registry of Databases
  A search tool for identifying data repositories, as well as data-related standards and policies.
• Commons Open Repository Exchange
  Commons Open Repository Exchange (CORE) is an Open Access repository for the humanities.
• NIH-supported Domain-Specific Repositories
  Interactive list of repositories focused on a specific discipline or data type.
• NNLM Data Repository Finder
  Tool to help locate NIH-supported repositories for sharing research data.
• Nature's Recommended Data Repositories
  Nature shares a list of recommended repositories for a variety of scientific disciplines.

• ICSPR
  Social science data repository that offers both public-use and restricted-use data deposit. CSU is an institutional member.

Generalist Repositories

• Dryad
  CSU's Dryad institutional membership makes publishing data in Dryad free for all CSU-affiliated researchers. Each dataset is assigned to a professional curator who will ensure the appropriateness and quality of the data and associated documentation.
• Figshare
  Freely available open data publishing platform with paid options for large datasets up to 10 TB.
• Harvard Dataverse
  An open repository maintained by Harvard and based on open-source software.
• Mendeley Data
  Data repository owned by the Elsevier academic publishing company.
• Open Science Framework
  Free, open-source project management tool that supports open science practices throughout the research lifecycle.
• Vivli
  A fee-based, restricted-access data sharing platform for individual participant-level data from clinical trials.
• Zenodo
• A general-purpose open repository operated by CERN. Also good choice for publishing research software, with a number of software licensing options and an integration with GitHub.
• Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI)
• Generalist Repository Comparison Chart
• Generalist Repository Selection Flowchart

This Open Data guide is inspired by content from the University of Washington Libraries' Publishing and Sharing Research Data guide.