Data management good practices

Use this tool to help you assess and ultimately select a repository for data sharing.

Download a detailed Google Doc version of this handout from Research Data Services: Data sharing repository selection tool

• Funder-supported, such as NIH’s list 
   
• Discipline-specific, such as the social science repository ICPSR 
   
• Generalist repositories, such as Figshare
   
• Large compute-heavy repositories, such as CodeOcean or GEMS Informatics
   
• Institutional repositories, such as the Data Repository for the UMN (DRUM)

• FAIR principles

• Office of Science and Technology Policy list of characteristics

• NIH's list of desirable characteristics for data repositories

1. Check your notice of grant award (NOGA) and with your specific funding institute, center, or office (ICO) to determine whether either encourages the deposit of data into a specific data repository (e.g., if you are complying with NIH’s Data Management & Sharing Policy, the specific institute that released the RFA may require a particular repository).

2. Explore funder-supported repositories to see whether a repository listed under your ICO, subject area, or model system is a good fit for your data. You can quickly locate funder-supported repositories with a Google search.

3. Share in a general data repository, discipline-specific repository, or DRUM.

   1. Data Repository Finder from MIT 

   2. Generalist Repository Comparison Chart

   3. NNLM lists of domain specific and generalist repositories 

   4. NIH Data Repositories

Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research (ICPSR) is a repository for social science research. It offers full curation, member-only, and restricted access to data. Learn more about depositing in ICPSR. 

Dryad is a repository for the sciences, but also takes general data. It offers workflows for peer review of data and open-access data sharing.

• Does your grant or funding agency require a specific repository?

• Is there a repository that specifically supports your discipline?

• What are the repository’s policies?

• What is the level of access, restricted or open-access?

• Do services include persistent identifiers and pathways for discovery?

• What is the longevity of the data in the repository?

• What support do they offer in the curation process?

• Are there fees for sharing data and/or curation?

• Deposit agreement or license

• End user agreement

• Human participant data policies

• Preservation policy

• Deaccessioning policy

• Existence of a certification

• DRUM is a free public-access repository with no associated curation or deposit fees.
• DRUM meets many of the NIH and OSTP recommended features of data repositories. 
• However, DRUM is not suitable for all kinds of data. See limitations below: 
  • Human Participant Data Policy: data should be non-sensitive, de-identified, and have clear participant consent for open-access sharing. 
  • Data Collection Policy: data should be owned by the depositor or depositors must have clear rights to share, and documentation should be sufficient to understand the data. 
  • DRUM is not a good fit for large datasets (individual files over 5GB and submissions over 50GB total), which are difficult to both submit and access through DRUM. 

Generalist Repository Comparison Chart maintained by NIH

Data Repository Finder maintained by NNLM