Making research data open: what’s on offer?

This week is Open Access Week, a global event to promote the goals of Open Access and the benefits of open sharing, so what better time than to share how we can help you to make your research data open. Lindsey Myers writes about the benefits of open data and the support available to York researchers.

Open access is a broad international academic movement that seeks free and unrestricted online access to the results of scholarly research, such as publications and data. When we apply the principles of openness to research data, we talk about open data.

“Open data and content can be freely used, modified, and shared by anyone for any purpose” The Open Definition

Open data offers many benefits. For scholarship it can increase the integrity, quality and productivity of research, making the optimal reuse of research data possible. For the researcher, she can benefit in terms of academic reputation and reward, opportunities for collaboration with data users, and the generation of impact. It has been shown that research articles, and the data itself, receive more citations when the underlying data is open (Piwowar & Vision, 2013, 'Data reuse and the open data citation advantage'; SPARC Europe, 2017, 'The open data citation advantage: a briefing paper'). So there are selfish reasons for making data open that all researchers can take advantage of.

How we help researchers to make research data open 

One of the ways we can help is by providing a home for research data. After a research project ends, valuable research data needs to be deposited with a suitable data repository so that it can be stored for the long-term and made available to others as appropriate. To this end we provide the Research Data York service. Researchers can deposit their research data with Research Data York and we will look after it for a minimum of 10 years. We asked researchers to provide a description of their deposited datasets so that others can understand and interpret the data, enabling its reuse. We use the York Research Database to make datasets discoverable and to provide access, publishing a description of the dataset along with a download link here. A CC BY licence is applied to open data, which informs those who want to reuse the data that they can as long as they give appropriate credit to the data creator (the researcher). A DOI (digital object identifier) is minted for deposited datasets so that researchers can cite their research data within their published papers, making the reader aware of the availability of the data and aiding data discovery. In these ways we are supporting our research staff and students to make their data open and to make them FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).

We are also making it easier for researchers to deposit their research data with Research Data York. In the near future researchers will be able to upload the datasets they wish to deposit with the service in Pure, a system used to record York’s research activities, outputs and datasets. Researchers who have datasets that are too large to upload to Pure need not worry, we will provide temporary read-write access to a ‘drop-off’ folder to enable the easy transfer of large datasets to the service.

Of course, not all research data can be made open. The release of some research data will be limited or even prohibited by legal, ethical or commercial constraints. We therefore encourage researchers to take the approach “as open as possible as closed as necessary” with their data. Decisions made by a researcher early on will affect how she can use, archive and share data later and that is why it’s so important to plan for data management and sharing from the start of project. DMPonline is a handy free tool for researchers who are funded, as it helps them to create, review and share data management plans that meet funder requirements. Alternatively, use York’s simplified data management plan template (and the prompt sheet) to start planning your data management and sharing.

What can you do to make your research data open?

The most important thing you should do is to plan ahead, plan your data management and plan for archiving and sharing of your research data. Create a data management plan, address all ethical and legal issues, and consider what is appropriate given the nature of your data and any restrictions you may need to impose. To be of most benefit open data should be made FAIR. To make your data FAIR, deposit it in an appropriate data repository under an open licence, in reusable formats, with appropriate documentation to make it intelligible to others, and cite the data in your publications.

Lindsey Myers is a Research Support Librarian at University of York.