Research Data Management and Sharing

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.

Open Science Framework (OSF)

You can also manage your research and share your supplementary materials and data with ASU OSF, a free scholarly web tool that enhances transparency, fosters collaboration and increases the visibility of research at the institutional level at osf.asu.edu. Sign in with ASU authentication and start today or contact ASU Library Research and Publication Services to learn more about ASU OSF.

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 Dataverse Research Data Repository.

 dataverse.asu.edu

What is Dataverse?

Dataverse is ASU's research data repository where ASU affiliated researchers share, store, preserve, cite, explore, and make research data accessible and discoverable. Dataverse is a research data management service platform that serves in the publication and reuse phase of the research data lifecycle.  Check out the ASU Dataverse 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.

You can identify a suitable disciplinary repository via the Registry of Research Repositories, which hosts a searchable database of data repositories. 

So many choices!

Indeed, reviewing the registry can be confusing.  Data publication and preservation support varies and might leave you asking which one is right for your data? There are a few tools that are being developed that might help you decide. Below are suggestions that are outside of ASU's control but are worth a look.

• 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. The tool is hosted by DataCite and queries the re3data registry of research data repositories. The interface provides filtering for repositories that best support findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable research data.
• 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 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.

• 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.

• Dryad - A repository which hosts research data underlying scientific and medical publications. Historically, the repository has been strongest in the life sciences.

• Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social sciences. An international consortium of more than 700 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. 

  The ASU Library provides assistance with creating accounts, ICPSR services and policy, 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.

ASU in-house disciplinary options:

The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR), an international archaelogical digital archive and repository by the Center for Digital Antiquity

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. See Publishing Data for information about uploading and publishing CAP LTER products.

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. 

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.

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.