Research Data Management and Sharing

Understanding your data sharing and storage options depends on where you are in your project. The active research phase versus the final publication phase of a project has different needs and platforms. The following sections clarify the distinction between repositories and storage services.

Active Research: Create and Explore Phases

• Sharing Data: During the active research phase, sharing data involves providing access to datasets, code, and other research materials with collaborators, colleagues, or project team members. This sharing facilitates collaboration, facilitates verification of findings, and enables data reuse within the research team.
• Example: Sharing raw experimental data with lab members facilitates collaborative analysis and interpretation of the data.

Final Publication: Share, Preserve and Re-Use Phases

• Sharing Data: In the final publication phase, sharing data involves making research outputs, such as datasets, code, and supplementary materials, publicly accessible to the broader scientific community. This sharing promotes transparency, reproducibility, and the potential for further research and discovery beyond the original study.
• Example: Depositing curated datasets in a disciplinary repository along with a published research article to enable independent verification and reuse by other researchers.

Storage Needs:

• Active Research (Create and Explore Phases): During the active research, storage needs typically focus on securely managing and organizing data for ongoing analysis, collaboration, and experimentation within the research team. These needs may involve using local servers, cloud storage platforms, or institutional data repositories.
• Final Publication (Share, Preserve and Re-Use Phases): When you publish, storage needs shift towards ensuring the long-term preservation and accessibility of research data for future use and reference. This action requires depositing data in trusted repositories or archives equipped with preservation infrastructure and public access policies.

Repositories vs. Storage Services:

• Repositories: Research data repositories serve as publication and preservation systems designed to enable public access, discovery, and reuse of research data. They provide infrastructure and services for long-term storage, metadata documentation, versioning, and access control, often adhering to community- or discipline-specific standards.
• Storage Services: In contrast, basic storage services such as Dropbox or Google Drive primarily offer file storage and sharing capabilities for general-purpose use. While they may provide convenient storage solutions for active research data management, they lack the specialized features and sustainability measures necessary for long-term preservation and public access.

Research Data Publishing Analogy:

Similar to article publishing, research data publishing is a process that involves publishing scholarly articles, but requires additional work on the researcher's part to prepare the data for public use. Just as journal articles are disseminated through publication platforms to achieve broader visibility and accessibility, research data is published in repositories to facilitate discovery, verification, and reuse by the scientific community.

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
  • 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.
• Dropbox 1TB limit for individuals, 25TB for teams
• OneDrive account: 1TB for individuals, 5TB 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 ASU Research Computing team provides state-of-the-art computing clusters to support research activities that require high-performance computing power. Research Computing also offers workshops on various skills and holds office hours. Visit Research Computing Dates and Times to request a consultation during their office hours and view the scheduled workshops. 

Electronic Research Notebooks

An Electronic Research Notebook (ERN), often referred to as an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN), is a multifunctional data manager designed to help consolidate 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. This commercial-grade research management platform supports the documentation of 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.

Where should I publish my data? 

Institutions and funding agencies expect researchers to share their data in research data repositories upon completion of a project and publication of their research articles. They are more than just storage. Repositories provide rich metadata for discovery and context, documentation on how to use your data, persistent identifiers for long-term access, and discoverability of your research data.

Many repositories serve the research community, and it is worth checking with your funding source to see if they prefer where the data are published and archived.  The following sections provide an overview of the types of research data repositories you can choose from and help you make an informed decision on how and where you share your research data.

Finding a repository to publish your data

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.

The ASU Research Data Repository for university-affiliated researchers

The ASU Research Data Repository allows ASU-affiliated researchers to share, store, preserve, cite, explore, and make research data accessible and discoverable. Our librarians provide expertise in curating and sharing cross-disciplinary research data produced at Arizona State University.

Working on a grant proposal? Check out Writing the ASU Research Data Repository in your data management and sharing plan in the repository depositor user guide.

We also recommend exploring the repository to see how others share their data and to gain insight into how datasets are described and linked to relevant articles, presentations, and reports. You can also find data here and from other repositories in the ASU Library One Search.

Not all research data can be shared in ASU's institutional repository, so the ASU Library also works with you to identify alternative solutions if the repository is not the appropriate place to archive and share your data.

We accept research from ASU faculty and staff projects. For student-created projects, we recommend using the OSF or Zenodo, as described in the General Research Data Repositories section below. 

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

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.

Sign in with ASU authentication and start today or contact ASU Library Researcher Support to learn more about OSF.

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.

We recommend using the CC0 license, also known as "Public Domain Dedication," along with a suggested citation. In many cases, data (such as collections of facts) may not be eligible for copyright protection. By assigning a license like CC-BY, you may create unnecessary barriers to reuse and confusion. You can ensure proper attribution by providing a suggested citation, as scholarly norms, rather than licenses, govern how data should be cited to demonstrate the credibility and validity of the research. 

The University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication provides an overview of this topic in their article "CC BY and Data: Not Always a Good Fit," which recommends using the CC0 license for many types of data. Additionally, CC0 serves as the default dedication when you publish your datasets in the ASU Research Data Repository. 

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

For more information, please refer to the section on Licensing and Data below. If you have further questions, feel free to contact the ASU Library Researcher Support team for assistance with copyright licensing for authors and researchers.