Tagged / research data

Benefits of depositing your data

Depositing your data is a key activity when a research project is concluded. Key benefits to doing so are:

Long-term preservation

When archiving/ depositing your data, you are taking the first step in maintaining your data for the long-term. Data repositories will store and preserve your research data securely and that means you do not have to think about the prospect of losing your data in the foreseeable future. Repository staff are then responsible for the curation, discoverability, and accessibility of your data.

Get published, get cited

Depositing your data does not replace the process of publishing a research article. It enhances it. In fact, funders increasingly require data publication when they are providing a grant, and journals are aligning themselves with this process by asking the data to be published alongside with your article.

Citations are important to demonstrate impact and depositing your data can have a positive impact to your research profile through citations of your research data when re-used by other researchers. Sharing your data can also lead to further collaborations.

An image that describes 4 benefits of depositing research data. The benefits are, one) Improve your research profile two) better research impact three) tackling the reproduceability crisis and four) Meet funder and journal requirements

Image 1: Benefits of depositing research data

Enable further research

Datasets can complement other research efforts and generate new results when examined in new contexts. Moreover, when depositing your data, you are enabling the research community to benefit from your data, ensuring research efforts of your peers are directed into new areas. Finally, sharing your data transparently contributes to tackling the wider re-produceability crisis, whereby publishing your data you are allowing other researchers to test and verify the validity of your results.

 Where to deposit

Ideally, when your research project has been finalised, you will deposit your data to a repository that is related to your discipline.  You can identify suitable services using the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data). Note that there are charges associated with some repositories.

Alternatively, you can deposit your data with BU’s own data repository (BORDaR). There is no charge, and a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be generated which you can pass on to publishers to link any outputs to the original data.

It is helpful to consider where to deposit your data at the start of a research project, and to plan for any resources needed to prepare your data for publication. To this end, a Data Management Plan (DMP) should be completed at the start of every research project.

Further guidance can be found in the Library’s Research Data Management guide. If you have any specific questions, you can also email us at: bordar@bournemouth.ac.uk.

UK Data Service Webinars

We have received notification of the following external webinars:

UK Data Service webinars – April to June 2020

Take a look at our 2020 free online training programme of regular introductory webinars. To help you get the most from the UK Data Service, our series of webinars introduce different aspects of the Service. Join us for:

  • Introduction to the UK Data Service, 7 May
  • Finding and accessing data in the UK Data Service, 14 May
  • Key issues in reusing data, 21 May
  • Data management basics, 28 May
  • Guided walk through ReShare, 4 June

These webinars take place from 15.00 – 16.00.

We also provide more specialised webinars, including:

  • Web-scraping for Social Science Research: Websites as a Source of Data, 23 April, 15.00 – 16.00
  • Web-scraping for Social Science Research: APIs as a Source of Data, 30 April, 15.00 – 16.00
  • Being a Computational Social Scientist, 12 May, 13.00 – 14.00
  • Power Pivot and Dynamic Arrays in Excel, 19 May, 15.00 – 16.00

To book a place visit the UK Data Service events page.

Slides and recordings of UK Data Service webinars are made available on our past events pages and YouTube channel soon after the event has taken place.

This post is for information only. Bournemouth University is not responsible for the content or any other aspects of such external websites.

ESRC have updated their Research Data policy

The ESRC has updated its research data policy .

The key points are:

  • it is the grant holder’s responsibility to incorporate data management as an integral part of the research project, and
  • data must be made available for re-use or archiving with the ESRC data service providers within three months of the end of the grant.

Please click on the link above for further information.

Sharing your research data?

Would you be prepared to share your data with the wider research community or the general public? 

A report published by the Research Information Network has found that UK data centres, which collect, store and supply research data to academics (such as the National Geoscience Data Centre at the British Geological Survey), have boosted research efficiency and improved a “culture of sharing data”.  However, the report adds that work is needed to encourage researchers to submit more data to the centres.

The Royal Society has an ongoing major policy study that looks at the use of scientific information as it affects scientists and society, “Science As a Public Enterprise”.   In theory raw data should be available for validation and further exploration but issues of quality control, appropriate retention policies, and the utility of storage of vast arrays of ‘raw’ data require urgent attention.  The study is primarily focusing on the exchange of information among scientists and other scientifically literate audiences.  A secondary focus of the study is public engagement with scientific information.

The British Academy response to the project is that all data produced through publicly funded research should be made available, provided confidentiality is protected, so that public policy and debate can be based on the best available evidence.  They suggest that opening up data could also have the advantage of aiding interaction between the arts and sciences.