Archive & Publish

At the end of your research project, you need to archive your research data in accordance with the policies of your institution and/or funder. The FAIR guiding principles help you to make your data and software 'as open as possible and as closed as necessary'.

Archiving your data

Archive your data

In the lifecycle of research data, it is important to distinguish between the phase where data is still being manipulated and analyzed (mutable data) and the phase when research data has become static to its initially intended purpose (immutable data).

For the phase after research the Research Data Policy of your faculty or institute contains guidelines on how and where to store your data and for how long (the retention period).

Sharing archived data

Please note that Unishare/SurfDrive and Google shared drives (or any other cloud solution) do NOT assure the long term availability of shared research data and should not be used as an archive. To share and keep archived research data you can publish your data through a data repository such as DataverseNL.

More about data storage on the University workplace (X- / Y-drive)Learn more about publishing your data in DataVerse

Data publication

It is always important to define how your research data can be reused by others. When there are no limitations, the data can become openly available to everyone. However, there may be reasons to restrict access to the data, for instance to protect personal data or to respect third party licences. No matter whether your research data is open or restricted, the Terms of Use of the dataset should always be defined. The Terms of Use are part of the metadata. As such, the information about the intended use of the data is always publicly available, even if access to the dataset is restricted.

DCC Guide on Terms of Use for Datasets (PDF)

How to publish open data

How to publish data with restricted access

The DCC also offers support and specific consultancy on:

Data Availability Statement

Publishers often ask for a Data Availability Statement before your publication will be reviewed or published. A data availability statement, also known as “data access statement” or “data sharing policy”, explains to the reader where data (and software) associated with the publication is available and under which conditions.

For open and restricted data you can use the persistent identifier (handle or DOI) the data repository provided when you posted and published your material. Check out the information on research data repositories below for more information. The Data Availability Statement allows for combinations if, for example, part of your data needs protection and part of your data is openly available.

Examples of Data Availability Statements:

Metadata

Adding metadata (in the form of legends, glossaries, etc.) to your files is more important than you might think because these data are essential to the interpretation and reuse (and, above all, retrieval) of datasets. Determine in advance which metadata are essential for a correct interpretation of the data and should therefore definitely be included; this way, you avoid spending a lot of time and effort on uploading files that turn out not to be that useful.