Research Guides: Research Data Management: Preserving & Sharing Data

Archiving Data: Considerations

"Archiving" in the context of information sciences means a process of curation (a.k.a. careful selection and description), preservation, and often sharing.

Archiving data is one of the last phases in the research lifecycle. Here are a few things to keep in mind while your project is underway in order to support this final phase of your research:

What data might be useful for secondary analysis?
Will you be able to strip out any sensitive variables and still retain the quality of the data?
Are you able to document your methodology appropriately?
Can people reproduce your findings based on the data and documentation you are able to provide?

If a given dataset is not useful or understandable, then perhaps it should not be archived. If there is any confusion, it is always best to speak with the staff at the data archive or repository you have selected. They will be able to review your data and documentation to better inform you of your data's archiving and preservation needs.

Humanities and Social Sciences

Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA)
ARDA allows for religion-related data submissions to be sent to their organization for archiving.
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR)
ICPSR welcomes and encourages deposits of digital data. Deposits are made using a secure data deposit form to describe the data collection and upload content.
Linguistic Data Consortium (LDC)
The Linguistic Data Consortium permits contributions to be made to its archive using a submission form.
Odum Institute
The Odum Institute Dataverse Network archives data in the social sciences and health sciences fields. To get assistance with depositing your data, please contact the Odum Institute.
Roper Center for Public Opinion Archives
The Roper Center encourages researchers and survey research firms to deposit their computer-readable survey data in the archives for long-term preservation and for use in secondary analysis by other social science researchers.
National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture
Free and easy access to data on the arts and on the arts' value and impact for individuals and communities. Hosted by ICPSR and funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Qualitative Data Repository (QDR)
Access to qualitative data, curation, events, and repository services for GW researchers. GW instructors, teaching faculty, and course designers are also able to access a diversity of resources to support classroom instruction and learning.

Science and Engineering

DataONE: Data Observation Network for Earth
DataONE is a network of repositories and data archives. You may submit your data to Member Nodes, which will be searchable through DataONE.
Dryad Digital Repository
The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Its main disciplines are ecology and biology, but Dryad can accept data submissions of many formats and from many disciplines.
Figshare
figshare allows you to manage your research in the cloud and control who you share it with, or make it publicly available and citable.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories
Includes Protein Data Bank, PubChem, dbGaP and others
NOAA National Climatic Data Center
The NCDC archives the nation's global climate and weather-related data and information.
PANGAEA
Earth and life sciences data
Treebase
Repository of phylogenetic data
Zenodo
Zenodo is an open dependable home for the long-tail of science, enabling researchers to share and preserve any research outputs in any size, any format and from any science.

More Repositories

re3data
Registry of research data repositories, includes information on access, licensing and standards.
GW ScholarSpace
GW ScholarSpace is the institutional repository at the George Washington University.
Harvard Dataverse
An open source repository for publishing, citing and discovering research data.

Sharing Code

The resources below are repositories dedicated to sharing and distributing code to increase searchability and accessibility.

If you are interested in preserving your code and getting a DOI, check out "Making Your Code Citable," or this GitHub browser widget.

GitHub
An online tool and resource for collaborating, sharing, and working on code. Free to work publicly with teams of any size.
BitBucket
Online tool for collaborative coding. Free for teams of five or less. Free version supports private and public code sharing.
Run My Code
Run My Code allows users to search for and use code created by researchers and shared through its platform.

Research Data Management

Data Services Librarian