Research Data Management

A simple and effective way to share your research materials is to publish them in a repository. A repository is a storage facility (often also a preservation and curation facility) where users can upload and download their data, make it accessible and discoverable, all in an effort to fulfill grant requirements and/or support the free sharing of scholarly knowledge. Materials that are deposited into a repository should be:

• Persistent (not likely to be modified)

• Searchable and browesable 

• Retrieved or downloaded easily

• Citeable

A wide variety of institution-based and discipline-specific repositories exist for researchers to choose from. The repository itself should be: 

• Appropriate for the type of data you generate
• Appropriate for the audience of the repository (so they will make use of your data!)
• Open access

If both a discipline-specific repository and an institution-based one exist for your data, then consider depositing in both locations to maximize discovery and safety of the data. If you need some help finding an appropriate repository for your work, don't hesitate to reach out to us!

Publishing Data

There are many more repositories than we could list here, so we'll include our institutional repository and some up-to-date aggregators of repositories that can help you search for the right repository in your field:

• NYU Databrary: a repository for audio/video data, specializing in behavioural sciences
• NYU UltraViolet: NYU's research repository.
• Open Science Framework (OSF): can make a registration of an OSF project to make a "read-only, frozen" copy of it that is assigned a DOI for sharing and citation.
• OAD list of data repositories: a list of repositories and databases for open data maintained by the Open Access Directory.
• re3data: a repository finder that can help you find an appropriate repository to deposit your research data.

Publishing Code

Your options for publishing research code are somewhat more limited. There are:

• NYU UltraViolet: NYU's repository will take software deposits.
• List of journals that publish software papers (e.g. manuscripts primarily about software).
• Zenodo: has specialized metadata fields for code, issues DOI for everything uploaded, and links into GitHub to enable directly publishing software.

NYU Libraries funds NYU's memberships in a few repositories that we consider to be conducting high-quality curation and helpful services for our community.