Publish your data

Public funders and Brunel University London expect data underpinning research findings to be made openly available with as few restrictions as possible. Where there are reasons to protect access to the data, for example, commercial, legal or ethical requirements, these should be clearly stated in the published results, by way of a data access statement.

Benefits of data sharing to the researcher:

  • Increase visibility of research (including more citations)
  • Find and develop new collaborations
  • Improve trust in published findings through transparency and enabling data validation
  • Compliance with funder, publisher and institutional policies
  • Data deposition supports the preservation of data long term

Benefits of data sharing to funders, the research community and beyond:

  • Enable unforeseen reuse of data
  • Optimal use of publically funded research
  • Reduces duplication of data collection
  • Data published via a recognised repository will be stored and preserved long-term
  • Wider public availability of research data supports the translation of research into practice

Data should also meet the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles.  To be made open and FAIR, data should be deposited in a data repository. Using a data repository is preferable to sharing data as supplementary files alongside the article, or via cloud-based file storage and sharing services, such as Dropbox or the Open Science Framework or maintaining data in private data storage and sharing on request only. 

A data repository performs a number if specific FAIR functions:

  • It provides managed storage which ensures data are kept safe long-term and in some cases, migrated to preservation formats
  • It publishes machine-readable metadata by applying standard vocabularies
  • It assigns persistent unique identifiers (e.g. DOIs) to datasets and makes them citable
  • It provides a way to control access to data, e.g. embargo all, or subsets of the data for a period of time or permanetely. 
  • It applies a licence which states the terms of re-use and attribution requirements 

You are not required to publish all the data you have created or collected during your research project. At a minimum, you should publish data which underpin your publications. These might include data used to create any charts or graphs or data required to justify quantitative statements. You can also deposit code. 

The following points should be addressed to ensure that your data are ready to be submitted to Brunelfigshare (the University's data repository) or another research data repository.   

1. Check your funder and Brunel's requirements for publishing data and your data management plan

Most funders (research councils, charities and academies) have introduced data policies which include expectations on sharing research data. A summary of the main University funders' policies can be found on our Funder open access and data policies page.

If you are not sure about the policy of your funder (or whether your funder has a specific research data policy), please contact your research funder directly.

If your research is funded, it is very likely that your grant application includes a data management plan. which may contain information on how the research will be shared and published.

2. Permission - ensure you have permission to deposit the data and make it accessible.

You must ensure you own the intellectual property rights of the data or have permission of all other rights holders to publish the data. This will include permission from rights holders of third party material included in the datasets. Information on data ownership can be found in Brunel's Research Data Management policy and Research Integrity Code.

3. Decide what (if any) conditions will  apply to your data?

Decide whether your data can be shared openly, or if it requires access restrictions. Does your data include confidential and sensitive information? Have participants given consent for their data being shared? Consider what can be done to make sensitive data openly sharable - can these data be anonymised? If different parts of your research data require different access conditions, separate them and deposit them separately, applying different access conditions.

4. Use open formats (where possible) to future proof your files.

Choose open formats or commonly used file formats to future proof your data files and maximise re-use.

Information on open formats can be found on our working with research data guidance page. 

5. Include documentation and metadata necessary for others to reuse the data

You should also aim to include documents that provide the necessary information required to reuse the data. These may include research methods and protocols, lab notebook records, instrument guides, codebooks, survey questionnaires and sample consent forms. It may be more convenient to include these as .txt .pdf or .csv files accompanying the data files. More information on the kind of documentation you can provide can be found on our working with research data guidance page. 

6. Decide whether the data need to be temporarily embargoed

Decide whether an embargo period is required. There may be limited periods of privileged use of data for UKRI funded researchers to enable publication of research outputs and ensure appropriate recognition for research teams. Data which specifically underpins a research publication should be made available alongside the publication.

7. Decide on an appropriate reuse licence

Research data needs to be licensed to indicate what users may or may not do with the data. Licenses or waivers are granted by the IPR holder of the data, so this will need to  be established from the outset. Various forms of license exist, ranging from standard Creative Commons licenses to bespoke restrictive licenses.  Data repositories will indicate what licenses are available. More information is available from the DCC: How to license research data.

8. Choose a suitable data repository

The best place to publish (and preserve) digital research data is in a research data repository or data centre. A repository is an online database service, a digital archive that manages the long-term storage and preservation of digital resources and provides a catalogue for discovery and access. Some funders will provide their own data centres or have a preferred repository. This will be made clear in the research data policy of your funder. See our  funder open access and data policies page for more information. 

If a repository is not specified by the funder, there are many discipline-specific and multi-discipline data repositories available where data may be deposited. The University also has its own research data repository, Brunelfigshare, where data underpinning publications or data of long term value can be deposited and published.