Data as a publication
Publishing your data (or your software or code) means you can treat it like a publication, which can be discovered, cited and reused by others. You can include it in a bibliography or a list of references in a journal article or book chapter, or even on your CV, ORCiD or LinkedIn profile.
Data can support a journal article or it can be a standalone research output in its own right.
You can publish data in papers in a data journal. Data journals are scholarly journals that publish datasets or data papers that describe how, why and when a dataset was collected.
If you can't publish your data for any reason, you can share the methodology of how you generated and processed the data. Examples could be a systematic literature review or the questionnaire you used when interviewing someone.
Broadening impact
Sharing your research data enables you to broaden the impact of your research and allows others to build on it. Access to datasets for secondary use can also benefit researchers who lack the resources to meet the costs of collecting new data. Data that are shared openly can also have an impact beyond academic contexts. It can be used in education, policy, media or innovation.
Publishing data:
- demonstrates academic rigour and integrity
- supports research reproducibility and transparency
- encourages its reuse
- enhances the visibility of your research and attracts collaboration
- allows usage to be tracked with a permanent identifier and encourages citation by others
- ensures long-term preservation of data when shared in a repository so you don't have to worry about it being lost or destroyed
- gives credibility to research findings
- represents better value for money for funders if all related outputs are published and are reused by others
Funder requirements
Many funders believe that publicly funded research is for the public good and expect grant recipients to publish the raw data from the funded work as openly as possible (i.e. where there are no ethical or legal reasons to prevent public release of the data).
It is important to know if your funder has a data policy on sharing data. It is your responsibility to know what you are expected to do to comply.
University of Cambridge expectations
The University of Cambridge Research Data Management Policy Framework outlines the responsibilities of research staff and students for research data management and data publication. Related to this is the University of Cambridge Open Research Position Statement. In essence, data, software, code, and methods should be made as open as possible and as closed as necessary.
In 2019, the University of Cambridge signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). One of DORA’s principles is to recognise all research outputs for their value and impact.