LibGuides: Research Data Management and Sharing: Sharing & Storage

Where can I put my data while working on my project?

Research Data Storage Best Practice

Regardless of where you choose to share and store your research data, you and your team should back up your data and maintain three copies:

The original files
External, local copies (e.g., external hard drive, department server)
External, remote copies via remote cloud storage supported by ASU such as
Google Drive New Limits as of December 31, 2022
- Faculty, Staff, Student Workers, and Retired Employees 20GB, Students 5GB
- Colleges, departments, or units can purchase an additional 10TB of Google Drive storage for $3,600 a year. Contact: googledriveincrease@asu.edu.
- See Research Computing Google Drive Storage Reduction Update for addtional information
Dropbox 1TB limit for individuals, 25TB for teams
OneDrive account 5TB for individuals, 25TB for teams

The sensitivity and classification of your data may dictate what resources you can use. See ASU Research Data Management Services for guidance on planning your data management strategy and to learn more about ASU research data storage options. Contact the Research Data Management Office for assistance.

Additional best practice information: UK Data Archive's guide on Managing and Sharing Data (PDF)

ASU Research Computing

The Research Computing team in Knowledge Enterprise Development provides state-of-the-art computing clusters to support research activities that require high-performance computing power. Research Computing also provides workshops on a variety of skills and office hours. Request a consultation and see what workshops are scheduled here.

LabArchives Electronic Research Notebook

An Electronic Research Notebook (ERN), often referred to as an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN), is a multi-functional data manager to help consolidate your research information in one place. During your project, an ERN can quickly and accurately import protocols, notes, observations, and other data from a computer or mobile device, as well as static objects such as photographs of gels. ERNs integrate into several types of lab instrumentation and store the generated data.

ASU now has an enterprise license for LabArchives, a commercial-grade research management platform that supports documenting methods, uploading images, and connecting to project storage. LabArchives also provides Intellectual property protection audit functions and meets the data management expectations of federal agencies. You can find more information on the product at Knowledge Enterprise's Research Data Management Electronic Notebooks.

Request LabArchives Training and Support.

ASU Research Data Repository

Where should I publish my data?

There are many data repositories currently serving the research community, and it is worth checking with your funding source to see if they have a preference for where the data are published and archived. See the Disciplinary Data Repositories section and find out how to identify a suitable disciplinary repository.

If there is no specific requirement, make your datasets accessible and discoverable in the ASU Research Data Repository and check out Writing the ASU Research Data Repository in your data management and sharing plan.

dataverse.asu.edu

What is the ASU Research Data Repository?

ASU's research data repository allows ASU-affiliated researchers to share, store, preserve, cite, explore, and make research data accessible and discoverable. This research data management service platform serves in the publication and reuse phase of the research data lifecycle. Check out the Research Data Repository Guide to learn more.

What do we consider research data?

Quantitative in the form of spatial and tabular files, remoting sensing output. Qualitative information such as documentation, interviews, and survey results. Supplementary information, including photos, digitized physical samples, and recordings.

Disciplinary Research Data Repositories

A variety of domain-based repositories are natural homes for your data. You can also increase the exposure of your data and collaboration opportunities for your research by depositing it in a disciplinary repository. Some repositories have fees for storing your files, so include those costs in your project proposal.

ASU in-house disciplinary options:

You may not need to look too far for a disciplinary solution. ASU is home to two well-known and established disciplinary research data repositories.

The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)
An international archaelogical digital archive and repository by the Center for Digital Antiquity
CAP LTER Data
The Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) project, one of 28 sites in the LTER network funded by the National Science Foundation, studies the ecology of the greater Phoenix metropolitan area and surrounding Sonoran desert region. All data sets from the project are published and shared in the CAP LTER Data repository unless limited by either privacy or license restrictions.
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See Managing Your Project Data and Metadata for information about submitting your data for publication: https://sustainability-innovation.asu.edu/caplter/managing-your-data/
DataOne
A community driven program providing access to data across multiple member repositories, supporting enhanced search and discovery of Earth and environmental data. DataONE also promotes best practices in data management through responsive educational resources and materials. You can browse and search the DataOne database.
ICPSR: Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research
ICPSR is an international consortium of academic institutions and research organizations, which provides data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR web portal provides access to a data archive of thousands of files of research in the social sciences. Searchable content includes specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
Adding dataset metadata to the NSF-PAR repository
The National Science Foundation (NSF) Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) for project reporting is a metadata index that does not receive dataset file submissions. You must have previously deposited your dataset into a repository that associates a DOI with your dataset.

The ASU Library assists with creating accounts, ICPSR services and policies, and information about data deposits. Request a consultation and ask for ICPSR support.

We also suggest reviewing the Generalist Repository Comparison Chart, the Open Access Directory's Data Repositories Wiki list of repositories and databases for open data, and the Data Repository Selection Decision Tree for Researchers in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences.

Contact a librarian for more help with these resources.

General Research Data Repositories

Dryad
A repository that hosts research data underlying scientific and medical publications. Historically, the repository focused on the life sciences which has evolved into an interdisciplinary repository.
Open Science Framework OSF
Manage your research and share your supplementary materials and data with the OSF, a scholarly web tool that enhances transparency, fosters collaboration, and increases the visibility of research at the institutional level.

The OSF limits the capacity of private projects and components utilizing OSF Storage to 5 GB and public projects and components to 50 GG. If your project exceeds these limits, see Calculating OSF Storage Costs to determine the appropriate amount of OSF storage and calculate the costs you will need to provide for your project. You can view ASU affiliated published projects at osf.asu.edu.

Zenodo
General-purpose data repository that accepts and preserves research output from data files to presentation files. Data is stored in the CERN Data Center, and open to researchers globally.

Finding and choosing a repository

Repository search tools

Reviewing these registries can be confusing. Data publication and preservation support vary and might leave you asking which is suitable for your data. A few tools are being developed that might help you decide.

Registry of Research Data Repositories - re3data
A searchable database of data repositories for identifying a suitable disciplinary repository
FAIRsharing.org
A curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, inter-related to databases and data policies. Identify and cite your discipline's standards, databases, or repositories when creating a data management plan, releasing data, or submitting a manuscript to a journal.
Repository Finder
A pilot project of the Enabling FAIR Data Project led by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in partnership with DataCite can help you find an appropriate repository to deposit your research data. DataCite hosts the tool and queries the re3data registry of research data repositories. The interface provides filtering for repositories that best support findable, accessibl
DataSeer
An open source project supported by the Sloan Foundation that seeks to fill the need for a low-cost, scalable solution to help researchers comply with stakeholder data sharing policies. It aims to show researchers what they need to do with the datasets to comply with funder and journal mandates by analyzing their manuscripts. Upload some research text, and DataSeer works on recommendations and can send an accessibility report to funders and journals. DataSeer provides examples to demonstrate which datasets to share from a particular article, the proper format, and which research data repository is most suitable.

Why Share Your Data?

In addition to funding agency requirements for the preservation of data, there are many reasons to share your data including:

Possible increased citations
Encourage enquiry and debate
Provide greater exposure to data
Possible future research collaboration
Provide resources for education and training.

Using CCO for datasets

We recommend using CC0 - "Public Domain Dedication" and adding a suggested citation because, in most cases, data (e.g. a collection of facts) might not be eligible for copyright protection. Assigning a license such as CC-BY creates an unnecessary barrier to re-use and confusion. You can facilitate attribution either way by providing a suggested citation, because scholarly norms, not licenses, dictate data citation to demonstrate the research is credible and valid. "CC BY and data: Not always a good fit" from the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication provides an overview of the situation and recommends the CC0 license for many kinds of data. CC0 is the default dedication if you are publishing your datasets in the ASU Dataverse research data repository.

Alternatively, the Open Database License (ODC-By) also has an attribution variant.

See Licensing and Data below for further information.

If you still have questions please contact the ASU Library Researcher Support team and request a copyright licensing support for authors/researchers consultation.

Licensing and Data

Copyright and Data

The ownership and copyright of data can be complex. When considering data, it may be more useful to think about rights and responsibilities, which can be more contextual and granular this simple copyright ownership. Data sharing, access, use, and preservation all intersect with copyright in different ways, so it is beneficial to start by considering what is being done with the data, and who is responsible for it. Copyright is not straightforward with data. There are complicated questions of what is and is not protected by copyright if other intellectual property laws apply, and who owns the data, especially with regards to institutional IP policies. The resources below are a starting place to help you in navigating this tricky terrain.

Data Licenses
From the Turing Way Guide for Reproducible Research, provides an overview of Creative Commons Licenses, Open Data Commons Licenses, and other considerations.
Open Data Commons
A set of 3 standardized licenses specifically meant to apply to data/databases
Copyrightability of Tables, Charts, and Graphs (PDF)
An article explaining how copyright does and does not apply to tables, charts, and graphs.
Sharing Research Data and Intellectual Property Law: A Primer
An article by Dr. Michael Carroll, published in PLOS:Biology in 2015, which explains how to work through the general intellectual property and contractual issues for all research data.
How to License Research Data - Digital Curation Centre
This guide will help you decide how to apply a license to your research data, and which license would be most suitable, as well as why licensing data is important, the impact licenses have on future research, and the potential pitfalls to avoid.
Who “owns” your data?
From the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication, this post by Katie Fortney walks through the complications around copyright/intellectual property ownership and data.
CC-BY and Data: Not Always a Good Fit
From the University of California's Office of Scholarly Communication blog: an article by Katie Fortney which explains Creative Commons (CC) licenses and public domain tools and how they work with data.
Sharing & Licensing Research Outputs
This instructional session will help you understand how research outputs like data, software, and code can be shared and licensed to maximize reuse and the contribution of knowledge. It explores: how copyright plays out for data, software, and code; other contracts and policies that affect what's "ours" and how we can use and share content; and license selection best practices.