Many benefits exist to sharing research data.
Funding Agency Requirements
As a result of the 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy memo, Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Scientific Research, many funding agencies encourage or require researchers to share the data resulting from the funded project.
Increased Visibility for the Researcher
Piwoware, HA, Day RS, Fridsma DB (2007). Sharing Detailed Research Data is Associated with Increased Citation Rate. PLosOne 2(3): e308. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0000308
The Advancement of Science and Knowledge
Sharing data encourages scientific inquiry, enables reproducibility of results, reduces redundancy of data production, and encourages transparency, among other benefits.
Open Science Framework is an online research collaboration tool and data repository. OSF allows researchers to collaborate, document, archive, share, and register research projects, materials, and data.
To learn more about this resource, visit the Open Science Framework Guide.
The University of South Carolina does not currently have a system-wide, long-term archiving option for research data. However, many external disciplinary and general data repositories exist. If you want or need to share your research data, one of these might be a good fit.
These repositories are also good places to find datasets for re-use.
Information about data repositories from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine can be found here.
If a disciplinary repository does not exist for your data, consider a repository for general data. The following repositories accept data from all disciplines:
If you are using another researcher's dataset, it's important to cite it to give that producer credit. Citing data also simplifies access to data for re-use.
Elements of Data Citations:
Data Creator
Title of Dataset
Year of Publication
Publisher (usually the data repository where the dataset is housed)
Edition or Version
Access Information (URL or other persistent identifier)
A recommended format is:
Creator (PublicationYear). Title. Publisher. Identifier
or, if version and type of resource are available:
Creator (PublicationYear). Title. Version. Publisher. ResourceType. Identifier