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University of Groningen Library
University of Groningen Library Open access Open Science Newsletter

Make your research data findable

Data can play an essential role to increase the visibility of researchers and their work. The University of Groningen (UG) research database Pure helps to improve the findability of research data. The Research Data Office provides support with registering the data and making them accessible.

Discover research data

Research data are considered raw material in science. Ideally, these raw data should be openly available to stimulate innovative research and publications. Hence, it is important to make the sharing and discovery of research data as easy as possible (Fecher, Friesike, Hebing & Phillips, 2015). However, many valuable datasets are often scattered in a jungle of repositories. Their ‘discovery’ is relevant for (peer) academics: It enables researchers from other academic fields to re-use research data. To make the discovery of research data even easier, the principles of ‘FAIR research data’ (Wilkinson et al., 2016) are applied: research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable.

Make research data findable – register them

This FAIR data process starts with registering the research data and thus making them findable. Researchers of the University of Groningen can record their data in the UG’s research database Pure. This concerns, however, not the actual research data but the metadata, which describe the actual research data. The data themselves are archived in a specific data repository. The use of a DOI or handle – which describes the location of the dataset – is highly recommended.

Expert support and advice

An online submission guide explains how to register research data in Pure. The UG’s Research Data Office (RDO) then validates the data and they are consequently visible in the research database. The RDO also offers (technical) support and advice on data-set description, metadating, persisting links and DOIs.

References

Fecher, B., Friesike, S., Hebing, M., & Phillips, R. (2015). What drives academic data sharing? Plos One, 10(2). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0118053

Wilkinson, M. D., Dumontier, M., Aalbersberg, I. J., Appleton, G., Axton, M., Baak, A., & Bouwman, J. (2016). The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship. Scientific data, 3. doi :10.1038/sdata.2016.18

Last modified:03 February 2023 3.06 p.m.